Moral Philosophy from the Greeks through Nietzsche;
Moral Philosophy in Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, others;
Moral and Political Philosophy from Hobbes through Marx and Anarchism;
Religion and Philosophy;
Feminism and Philosophy;
Existentialism, Structuralism and Deconstruction.
Arab Philosophy, Hinduism, Taoism;
Postcolonialism: Native American, South Asian and African Views.
Western Historical Periods
Ancient Times: up to 500 B.C.
Classical Antiquity: ancient Greece and Rome
Medieval Times: the “Dark Ages,” about 300 to 1300 a.d.
The Renaissance: 14th-17th centuries
The Enlightenment: Neoclassicism, 18th century
The Modern Age: Romanticism and Revolution, 19th – 20th centuries
The “Postmodern” age: what we live in now. What might be a better name for it?
Philosophy investigates not through authority or religion, but reasoning.
This process began in the West for the first time in Greece in the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries b.c.
The first Western philosophers used their reasoning and taught others to do so too.
Thales of Miletus: everything that exists must be water in some form; the world floats on water
Anaximander: the world is a cylinder floating in space
Anaximenes: the world is a flat plane floating on air
Why was Anaximenes’ idea more accepted than Anaximander’s – when the cylinder idea was closer to the truth?
Heraclitus & Pythagoras
Two Greek geniuses amongst the early philosophers
Heraclitus: taught the unity of opposites and the universality of flux (change)
Solid objects are not solid nor are they "objects":; everything is a process
Pythagoras coined the words philosophy & cosmology
[[#|Mathematics]] is the essence of philosophy
Math shows there must be an intelligent essence behind the cosmos
Xenophanes & Parmenedes
Xenophanes: human knowledge is a human creation
All of our scientific knowledge is conjecture
It is always replaceable by something that turns out to be nearer the truth
Parmenides: “Nothing” does not exist. Therefore existence cannot have “come out of nothing.”
There are no parts of reality where “nothing” is.
All of reality is beginningless – uncreated – eternal – imperishable.
Empedocles & the Four Elements;
The Atomists
Empedocles: everything is composed of Earth – Air – Fire –Water in combination.
The giant thinker Aristotle accepted this idea and it was carried into medieval Christian philosophy, only replaced in the Renaissance
Leucippus and Democritus: all is made of tiny indestructible particles
Using reason alone, discovered basic atomic physics
Socrates: The Great Turning Point in Philosophy
His conclusions about the philosophers:
They contradicted each other
Their ideas made little difference to how people live
His basic questions: What is good? What is right? What is just?
“Socratic Method”: by questioning, he showed that the “wise” knew little, and he got people interested in the important questions
He was convinced that behind concepts that are abstract but are real to us – such as Justice, Love, Beauty, Health, etc. – there must be some kind of abstract reality, existing invisibly but yet as real as matter.
This teaching was the seed for Plato in developing his World of Ideas
He was loved and respected, but reviled by the powerful for influencing people to question authority
Tried & found guilty of corrupting youth & disbelieving in the gods
When offered asylum elsewhere, he refused
He died consciously with his friends and students in attendance
Socrates & Morality
The only harm a person can suffer is harm to the soul
No one else can harm your soul - only you can do that
It’s far worse to commit injustice than to suffer it
If you fully understand a situation, you cannot do wrong; your conscience won’t allow you
Virtue is a matter of knowledge
He was the first to teach personal integrity as the #1 value
Takeaways for Socrates
Can be applied to your life & your understanding of the world:
oThe only real harm is harm to the soul
oIt is better to suffer wrong than to commit it
oThink for yourself – take nothing for granted
Plato
First philosopher whose written works have survived, and we have virtually all of them
Many call him greatest philosopher of all time
Socrates’ execution drove him to prove that Socrates was good and right
Plato’s earlier writings are 100% records of what Socrates said
His later writings develop Plato’s own philosophy in detail
Agrees with Socrates:
oThe only real harm is harm to the soul
oIt is better to suffer wrong than to commit it
oThink for yourself – take nothing for granted
Published 2 dozen "Platonic Dialogues", the chief of which are:
The Republic: portrait of an ideal state
The Symposium: on the nature of love
Others are named after their chief characters: Parmenides, Timaeus, etc.
Some of his best Dialogues are accounts of Socrates’ trial & death – Crito, Apology, Phaedo.
Plato’s Theory of Forms
What is beauty? What is courage?
These and other qualities, since we refer to them and “know” them, must have a real existence somewhere on their own – not just in objects or people
They are timeless essences existing independent of space and time
Everything in our world decays and changes; the Essences do not
Mathematics: a prime example. Numbers must have a real, abstract existence apart from all objects, or why would we all be born with basic understanding of numbers?
Underneath the apparent chaos we see, there is an underlying order with all the precision of mathematics
We can apprehend this with our minds even if we can’t see it
Plato called a “Christian before Christ” because of the way he divided reality into a lower world and an upper one
He believed that the human soul makes a step-by-step progress towards the Light of the Good through Love
Yet like Pythagoras, he believed in reincarnation, the oldest belief of humanity
Plato & the Arts
Humanity’s purpose is to contemplate and participate in the World of Ideas, the divine Forms that give meaning to the lower world
Therefore the arts are not good for people! They depict the illusions of the lower world as attractive.
A work of art is a “copy of a copy“ because what we see on earth are all copies of Ideas in the upper world
Allegory of the Cave
From birth we are chained in a dark chamber and only shown vague images of the truth.
We interpret these images according to our very limited knowledge.
Our direct experience is not of reality, but of what we have in our minds.
Plato’s ideal society
The Intellect should control society, governing the passions and the will
Society should have a supreme ruling class representing the intellect, with a “Philosopher King” at the top
A police class, called the “auxiliaries,” should carry out the decisions of the ruling class
These are the “guardians of society”
Sounds like the Soviet Union or the National Security state
Plato’s thought dominated Western society for 600-700 years
Neoplatonism
Plato's student Plotinus, 3rd cent. a.d., created “Neoplatonism,” a non-Christian doctrine which was adopted by Christianity
Neoplatonism emphasized and elaborated on Plato's idea that human beings are designed to ascend through their efforts in being more loving from a low point to the ultimate good
Neoplatonism was the norm in Christianity until Thomas Aquinas replaced it with theology based on Aristotle
Takeaways for Plato
Plato reinforces Socrates: don’t harm your soul!
For your contemplation:
Is there an underlying mathematical order to reality that we can apprehend with our intellects and feelings?
Is there a metaphysical reality, invisible, that gives meaning to what we see here in our reality, even in
California?
The Cave: are we shrouded and chained in ignorance here on Earth, and prevented from seeing and living in a better reality?
Aristotle His idea of form
Things are not just the matter of which they’re made – or a house would be boards, nails, etc.
A house’s structure & form make it a house.
If the form is not material, what is it?
The Four Causes or “Be-Causes”
Form causes things to be what they are.
What is the nature of this causing?
1. Material cause: what something is made of.
2. Efficient cause: what makes it, or crafts it, or builds it: creates it.
3. Formal cause: what gives it its shape.
4. Final cause: what its ultimate use or purpose is.
The form is not material, yet exists IN something material.
Aristotle & Alexander
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great to treat the Greeks as humans and all others as animals.
Such a teaching could never have come from Socrates or Plato.
Alexander showed his regret for warring against the world by making sure that at his funeral procession, his hands were outside his coffin, palms up, so that all could see that he died empty-handed.
Takeaways for Aristotle
Observation, experiment and logic can lead to discovery
Human beings are here on earth to be happy
Become happy by finding out what you’re good at and then doing it for the benefit of all
Thomas Aquinas: “Evil” Does Not Exist
In school he was known a the “Dumb Ox”
Became known as a brilliant professor
Eventually he resided in a monastery and never left his room
Wrote highly rational systematic theology
Reconciled Aristotle with the Bible
Stopped writing after having mystic visions
Called all his writing “nothing but straw”
Declared official theologian of Roman Catholic Church
In Aquinas, the battle between good & evil is a fiction,
a story we tell ourselves because we love drama
– but there are no such opposing forces.
He reasoned that existence is inherently good,
and that what we call “evil”
is only a matter of the good being missing or ignored.
Like Socrates & Plato, he said that what is, is good. “Evil” is just the lack of a “due good.”
In other words, evil is unreal.
It‘s only a “hole” in the good.
Evil is not an independent force
and has no energy of its own.
It’s just a sign that something is missing.
Thomas Aquinas’ Conclusion
He’s called the foremost theologian of the Church –
yet after having mystic visions near the end of his life, Aquinas said,
"I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw."
Takeaways from Aquinas
(1) Reason can strengthen faith.
(2) Ultimately, reason is of less value than spiritual experience.
(3) There is no evil.
It’s just that sometimes the good that should be there is missing.
No one is evil; some people are just missing something.
His Five Proofs assume that God is a person or being
rather than a quality, or a consciousness, or a force, or an energy.
It has always been easier for western people to relate to a person than to an energy.
Descartes
After a thousand years of Church deception,
he became obsessed with the question of whether we could ever know anything for certain.
Started from square one & applied the principle of Universal Doubt
Even if an evil spirit could deceive him in every way, he would still know he himself existed.
“I think – therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) became his baseline.
Brilliant at math; invented the Graph, with its “Cartesian Coordinates”
Loved math for its certainty; wondered how that certainty could be found in other areas
After deciding he was certain about his own existence, he decided he could be certain about God’s
To come to this conclusion, he used the Ontological Argument
Can we count on our senses at all?
Start from an undeniable fact and proceed with logic one step at a time:
this became the core of scientific method
His conclusion that humans are essentially their minds
brought him to believe that all is DUALISM; mind vs. what mind perceives (matter).
The split between mind and non-mind is known as Cartesian Dualism.
It has dominated the western worldview for 300 years.
Thousands of experiments have proven Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
When the fundamental particles of matter and energy are observed by a human,
they change.
Has this ended the mind-matter split once and for all?
Before Socrates, philosophers asked, “What exists?”
Socrates changed the main question to “How should we live?”
Descartes changed it again to “What do we know and how do we know it?”
(This is the "epistemological detour.")
Have we forgotten Socrates’ question altogether, or what?
On Descartes -
How can the immaterial mind move the material body?
This is still debated.
Let's now ask -
Is the mind really immaterial? Is the body really material?
Maybe we don't really know what we're talking about when we say these things.
If matter is energy and vice versa, don't we need a new way of discussing both?
Hobbes is in many ways the founder of the modern mechanistic scientific-type worldview.
He believed that everything was matter in motion, and there was nothing but matter.
He was also an extreme cynic who believed that humans are governed only by "force and fraud," and that life on earth is "nasty, brutish and short."
He was atheistic without quite saying so, and this was a hanging offense.
Hobbes managed to avoid persecution by saying, when asked if God exists, that "whatever the sovereign decides is right."
(Richard Nixon: "If the president does it, it's legal.")
So he put the question of God's existence off to the ruler, and got off the hook.
A person who says that spirit is nonsense, that all is matter, and that you should just obey your rulers - what would you make of such a man?
Why has he been such a popular thinker?
What attitudes does he encourage?
Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher in a Christian culture:
As a philosopher, he was unafraid to criticize basic things about the religion that gave him a degree of protection.
He was the first person in the West to do critical analysis of religious scripture - in his case of the Hebrew Bible.
This was risky business. Yet as a philosopher he knew it had to be done.
As for metaphysics, he applied reason to show that in reality there could not be a division between mind and matter as two types of substance,
but that there must be only one universal substance, which he identified as God. In other words he was a pantheist" "all is God."
The mind and the body are the same thing, conceptualized from different viewpoints.
When I see "me" as thinking, I'm looking at "me" as mind.
When I see "me" as walking, I'm seeing "me" as a body: as matter.
He attempted to out-do Descartes in creating a system of logical analysis of existence that would be completely certain in every way.
Insofar as his premises are unassailable, he succeeded. But no premise can be unassailable; at the best it can be highly probable.
Is the sun going to rise tomorrow? Probably. Not certainly.
(Besides, what do we mean by its "rising"?)
John Locke is one of the most influential philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, a person who has had enormous impact on modern thought.
He worked to establish great truths in both epistemology (the nature of the mind and learning) and in political and social thought.
Though Locke was English, he was a kind of American "founding father." Without his ideas -- no America.
Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Locke believed that all our ideas came from experience and the senses This position is called empiricism.
It contrasts with rationalism, which says that ideas can come from reason, the mind, without having to depend completely on the senses.
When we look at a basketball, all we are really seeing is our perceptions of that basketball within our minds.
If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, there is no sound. But there is still a tree falling.
See the box about Rationalism and Empiricism on page 113.
Descartes and Spinoza believed that the mind contains innate ideas known through reason; they are rationalists.
Locke and Berkeley believe that our impressions come not from innate ideas but from our experience; they are empiricists.
To know why particular ideas in philosophy are important, always remember their historical context.
One reason that Locke insisted our ideas come from our own experience was to contradict the medieval idea that our minds and everything else about us depend wholly on God.
Although he was not an atheist, Locke was trying to show that humans create their own destiny, their own fate, their own knowledge, their own societies.
Berkeley (pronounced "Barkley") took Locke's thinking further.
He pointed out logically that if we all we know of an object is our perceptions of it, then we do not have real knowledge that the object exists at all.
Size, shape, color, etc., are all ideas in the human mind, and we have no way of saying they actually exist in what we are observing.
All we can say is that we know our perceptions of it exist.
For that matter, how do we know that we're not dreaming those perceptions?
Such thought processes may seem to us rather pointless today, because after all, we can put shoe polish on shoes and make them browner and shinier, even if we cannot "prove" that they even exist.
Yet in the 17th and 18th centuries, such explorations were radical and controversial, and laid the foundation for modern psychology.
All of this careful and detailed "Age of Enlightenment" reasoning keeps leading to the inescapable idea that no matter how much we analyze and reason about the perception process, we cannot know anything for certain.
Berkeley brought God back into the equation of human knowledge, but in a mystical way.
Our minds all exist within the mind of God.
This does not return to the medieval church's worldview because it dos not make God into a dictator, a super-Pope inserting ideas into our minds.
Rather, God is the ground and atmosphere of our own experience.
Berkeley said we can be sure that objects exist, but actually as clusters of ideas, not as "material things."
The words "material things" show a mistake about the nature of reality.
"Materiality" as we have thought of it does not really exist.
Things which we mistake for "material things" of solid matter are actually spiritual entities.
They are real, for sure; they have a real existence--and that existence is in God's mind.
Berkeley also said that God speaks to us as individuals through our experiences.
Meditate on your experiences and you'll come to see what God is telling you.
Note the summary of mind-body theories at the bottom pf page 115:
In Descartes' dualism, there are matter and mind.
In Hobbes' materialism, there is only matter.
In Berkeley's idealism, there is no matter, only mind.
In Spinoza's "alternatism," there is one substance, which sometimes looks like mind, sometimes like matter, depending on the observer.
Which of these sounds most plausible to you? Why?
:-)
HINDUISM, BUDDHA AND EASTERN THOUGHT (many notes below on this subject are not in the textbook)
Hinduism is the background of Buddhism, just as Judaism is the background of Christianity. Hinduism is entrenched in the caste system (see 464), which may be the oldest skin-color-based racism in the world. Hinduism is strictly patriarchal (like Roman Catholicism); women may be saints but never leaders. The doctrines of karma, reincarnation and nirvana overlap with Buddhism (see p. 467). Buddha:
1. Buddha did not believe that in nirvana, individual existence ceases.
He taught that the EGO ceases,but that the Essence carries on,
and that a person then has complete freedom of choice for the first time.
Without being trapped by an ego, a person can choose either
to merge with Infinity, or to be reborn to help others.
One who decides to stay in the world and assist others to find enlightenment
is called a "bodhisattva."
2. Buddha did not believe that the existence of evil was a block against belief in God.
He taught that evil was the result of human choice, not anything that the Divine is responsible for.
3. He also taught that the universe is pervaded with dharmakaya,
the divine essence that consists of active compassionate love
for all people and all being.
Dharmakaya is the Buddhist equivalent of God:
not a person, but a spiritual being.
Buddhism originates in India, then after 1000 years becomes only a remnant there
By A.D 1 it begins to become major force in China
From China it spreads east and becomes dominant in Asia
Lifestyle or religion? A debated topic
The Buddha: born as Siddartha Gautama Shakya, noble caste
Six-year search for enlightenment
Became enlightened, then called “the Buddha” or Awakened One
Dharma = Natural Law, not obedience to social class system
The Four Noble Truths:
1. Life is suffering until nirvana is attained
2. Suffering is caused by desire for things that oppose nirvana
3. Such desire must be eliminated
4. The eightfold path eliminates such desire
The Noble Eightfold Path:
Right view
Right intentions
Right speech
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right mindfulness
Right concentration
Afterlife:
Karma = actions recoil upon the doer
Transmigration = souls will be reborn in other bodies
Nirvana = an end to the cycle of rebirth when one is enlightened; then one has the choice as to whether to be reborn or not
Ethics: Harm nothing and no one, including yourself
Open to both genders, all castes, all ethnicities
Moderate asceticism (middle way)
Vegetarian diet, no drugs or alcohol
Nothing that impedes or "twists" consciousness should be used
Detachment = one views one’s problems from a distance
Compassion = concern for sufferings of others
Bodhisattva = one who remains in this world in order to help others
Sutras = stories, books
The 'Canon" of official accepted scripture was set several hundred years after Buddha by conventions of monks
Eastern philosophy tends to focus on the interior world,
while Western philosophy tends to focus on the exterior world, or objective reality.
Several factors forcing a shift in the west to the interior:
Heisenberg and quantum physics
The crisis of the breakdown of morality
Growing interest in self-realization and enlightenment
While Western religion has a great emphasis on historical events
such as the history of the Jews, the life of Jesus and the life of Mohammed,
Eastern religion focuses on the teachings and how to live them.
Eastern thought tends to be more philosophical and less historical.
Permanent reality lies behind the veil of illusion known as “maya.”
Our senses and our minds constantly mislead us into believing that what we perceive is the only reality.
Kant & Schopenhauer agreed that the material world only exists in our perceptions of it.
Buddha said there were no gods, that the priesthood is false,
that woman is man's equal, and that ritual is detrimental.
All of this included a condemnation of the caste system,
which is the most powerful and pervasive belief in all of India -
the basis of its social and economic system.
He was labeled a heretic but gained millions of followers.
(Eventually the Hindus marginalized him by making him into one of their gods.)
Today some Buddhists have their own priests, rituals and gods, in spite of the Buddha.
Zen Buddhism seems the closest to what Buddha taught.
Takeaways from Buddha:
The main thing is not what you know, it’s what you make of yourself with what you know.
Life is a burden consisting of suffering –
until we learn how to get our desires under control.
The human will is the only source of evil and suffering.
Desire enlightenment above all, and you’ll cease suffering.
Hinduism: the soul is a continuous reality, life after life.
Buddhism: the soul is not continuous, but changes with every incarnation,
sometimes merging with others or parts of others.
Have Western philosophers believed in reincarnation?
Some have stated their belief in it: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, the Church father Origen.
Most have had no comment on it – just as they’ve had no comment on the “heaven-hell” belief.
David Hume Hume, an Irishman, was a humble man, yet brilliant. Above all he wanted his philosophy to be realistic and practical, yet he didn’t pull any punches in criticizing reason. He reasoned about the limitations of reason.
Apart from mathematics, we know nothing for certain. Yet to live a human life, we still have to take action in spite of our uncertainties. “We deal in hopeful probabilities, not in certainties.”
While Berkeley said that we can never know whether the world exists independently of ourselves, Hume took a further step and reasoned that we can’t even be sure we have “selves.” As far as our experiencing selves are concerned, We can only call ourselves “bundles of sensations.”
We should admit that we do not really use our intellects much in making our life-decisions. “Reason,” he said, “is the slave of the passions.”
If we cannot be certain of anything, how ridiculous it is to think we have the answer to everything! We should be modest, moderate and tolerant, Because the choices we make always assume that there are connections which we are unable to prove. So we are all groping in the dark. David Hume was a total skeptic, Yet had a moderate and compassionate attitude.
Since all we know that we observe is our perceptions, we cannot know that anything exists. Since all we see is one event following another, we cannot say we know that one event causes another. Since we cannot observe our own self, we cannot be sure that we even have one; the most a person can say about himself or herself is that they are a “bundle of sensations.”
Hume was “ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look at no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.” He was a great skeptic, and like Socrates, showed that we know much less than we think we know. However, he said that a good skeptic should doubt his or her own doubts!
Takeaways for Hume: 1. “Hume-mility!” Human beings are limited vessels. Our minds can give us the illusion that we can master the universe. Don’t buy it!
2. “Hume – manity!” We are all the slaves of our passions, And we all follow custom much more than our intellects, So no one has the right to think oneself superior. We’re all in the same boat, groping in the dark.
Immanuel Kant Considered the most in-depth philosopher since Plato and Aristotle Was brilliant and sought-after as a speaker The first philosophy professor Never left his home town, never married Internationally known during his lifetime
Most famous of his books: The Critique of Pure Reason It’s a difficult book, so he wrote an introduction to it called the Prolegomena Followed John Locke: what is the main limitation on what humans can know? It’s not what there is to know – it’s our own abilities Our knowledge is conditioned by the limited capacities of our senses and of our minds
Just because we cannot perceive something directly doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist A tasteless, odorless invisible gas can kill you! Gravity exists – yet we can never see it in itself
What we can perceive with our senses is bound to be much less than what actually exists. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” - Hamlet to Horatio We mistake the ‘photographs’ in our minds for actual reality. We cannot know the actual nature or essence of a thing. All we can really know of it is made up of the impressions in our minds. This is similar to Locke, Berkeley, Hume.
There are two worlds available to us: The world of phenomena – the things we can and do experience directly, with our senses. The world of noumena - the things we cannot experience directly, even though we know they are real.
Our knowledge of a dog or a mouse is that of our sense impressions. But what that dog or mouse may be in itself is forever unknown to us, and unknowable.The unknown world he called the noumenal world, also called the transcendental world. Space and time are forms of our sensibility. We cannot imagine anything existing outside of space and time. Yet we know that some things do. We experience Beauty, Justice, Peace – are they in space or time? We can work math problems. Where does math exist? In space or time? Where does the mind exist? Inside the skull? Then how can it perceive so much beyond its physical confines?
Kant endeavored to show through pure reason, without any faith or religion, that there exists a non-physical realm of existence, and that we interact with that realm constantly. The physical world we interact with has been shown to follow laws of math and science in every way. Yet we experience freedom of choice, and that has no connection with the laws of science. It cannot be diagrammed or proved, yet we know we have it.
Kant has had a huge impact on the study of reality known as metaphysics. His work encourages scientists to explore the unknown and to realize there are limits on what they can learn. His biggest impact, however, has been in the area of Ethics and Morality. How can we know right and wrong if we do not have confidence in religion to tell us? He worked out this problem in a way that has become basic to moral thinking. If all is material, where in the material world do we make choices that affect our bodies’ movements? If all is material, where in the material world do we decide whether something is good or bad? Choices and moral decisions must be made in some realm – a realm we can’t touch, feel see, smell, taste. Yet it is REAL. This is what Kant called the Noumenal Realm.
Hegel An inventor of historical theories - the first to say that history is an important part of philosophy. Marx built his communist system on the framework of Hegel, though Marx completely rejected Hegel's idea that all proceeds from spirit - mind - ideas; Marx was a total materialist, or tried to be. In Hegel, the Absolute is thought thinking of itself. Everything that exists is the product of the knowing mind. The absolute mind is a series of interlocking triads: a dialectic among thesis, antithesis, synthesis. All that is is a grand unfolding of necessary reason. This made Kierkegaard sick!
Arthur Schopenhauer All our experience is structured by the will. The will is as powerful a force as that which creates galaxies. yert it’s purposeless. We are driven by will and passions, not reason. We can live failrly well if we escape the passionate tyranny of the will and be placid. Loved Buddha! Was the first Western philosopher to learn about Eastern wisdom. Said that our constant throng of desires is what keeps us from happiness and peace – exactly what Buddha taught. He saw Kant as changing human knowledge forever! through five major breakthroughs (pp. 138-139):
Reality is divided into what we can experience and what we can’t: the phenomenal & the noumenal
All experience depends on our bodily apparatus
We can’t imagine anything that we can’t experience
Time/space and cause/effect are categories of our minds only and not of the world outside our minds
Science is key to understanding the empirical world, but can’t help us understand anything outside that world, i.e. in the noumenal world
His criticism of Kant: To exist as a separate something, a thing must exist in time and space, otherwise it flows into everything else. Time and space are the only things that differentiate objects. Outside the categories of time and space, everything must be One. Cause and effect exist only within the phenomenal world. Therefore nothing in the noumenal world can be the cause of anything else. The phenomenal is not different from the noumenal. It is the same thing, just understood in a different way.
The world, according to Schopenhauer, is a mess of conflicting wills, both human and cosmic, and it is not really fit to be our home. What did Schopenhauer say we should turn to, if we should look away from the world? Art, music, drama, poetry: these give us a glimpse of what is more real and important than the ordinary world.
Writers influenced by him read like a who’s who of modern literature: Tolstoy Turgenev Proust Zola De Maupassant Hardy Conrad Thomas Mann Chekhov Maugham G. B. Shaw Pirandello Rilke Samuel Beckett T. S. Eliot
Quotes from bumper stickers illustrating Schopenhauer: “Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” “Space is what keeps everything from bashing into everything else.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson & the Transcendentalists Emerson excelled as a preacher and pastor in a progressive Protestant church, but left to become an independent lecturer and scholar Gave a speech entitled //The American Scholar// in 1837, which was called “America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence." Chief ideas: Individuality, Freedom The ability for humankind to realize and achieve almost anything The relationship between the Soul, which is a part of Nature, and the surrounding world. Compare Rousseau, who said that children are corrupted by the unnatural world of civilization.
He influenced: Thoreau (author of Walden; a pioneer in civil disobedience) Walt Whitman (Emerson endorsed his poetry and began his fame) At any given time in the world, someone is reading one of Emerson’s Essays.
Takeaways for Emerson: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” “We must be our own before we can be another's.” Suggestion: Find and read his essay “Self-Reliance.”
Nietszche
Nietzsche took the view that there were two moralities: master morality (the morality of the noble individual)
and slave morality (the morality of the masses, epitomized by Christian ethics).
Master morality invigorated the human race, whereas slave morality was a denial of life.
Nietzsche saw his worldly outlook as a celebration of the will to power, which finds its highest expression in the noble individual,
the Übermensch or Superman, who has risen beyond the slave categories of “good” and “evil”
and who lives by the principle “There is no god or human over me.” No moral obligations bind the Superman. He may lie and victimize others freely to get what he desires.
In the U.S. in the 1930s, the two Jewish high school students who created Superman Comics,
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, presented Superman as a Nazi-fighter.
Thus the arrogant, elitist, racist “Superman” of Nietzsche was defeated by an American Superman!
Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
The ultimate internal human battle is between two forces,
the Apollonian (the force of measure, order, harmony)
and the Dionysian (the force of excess, destruction, creative power).
He did not see Apollonian order and harmony as creative.
He died insane, of syphilis!
Kierkegaard said the most important human activity is decision making, and the most important relationship is that of the individual to God. He's often called the very first Existentialist because of his insistence on actual experience rather than abstract theory. Hegel's insistence on abstract theory was what Kierkegaard chiefly objected to in Hegel, especially Hegel's ideas about the dialectic of existence. Kierkegaard's idea of dread and anxiety as being a major facet of being human is a common note in most existentialists.
Prologue to Moral Philosophy
Voltaire: A person who risked and sacrificed to bring moral betterment to society -
and succeeded!
Voltaire (1694-1778) was one of the best loved and most respected writers of his time.
When young, he realized it was urgent for people to learn certain profound new ideas, especially those of Newton and Locke.
He “bombarded the world nonstop with advanced views on every subject under the sun” --Bryan Magee
This made Voltaire a major figure in the historical era known as “the Enlightenment.”
Voltaire quickly became France’s most popular playwright.
He wrote novels, pamphlets, essays, histories and more – all brilliant and funny.
Imagine if such a person were today’s most popular filmmaker or music star!
Frequently in trouble with the rulers: in and out of jail, mostly on trumped-up charges
Two years of exile in England showed him what a society was like that respected laws and the individual
“The Enlightenment” meant that our ideas must be backed up by reasonable evidence, not just authority or superstition.
“Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them”
Most of Europe (unlike England) was ruled by tyrants supported by intolerant Catholics that persecuted their enemies
Voltaire’s Liberalism supported social equality and the rule of law, opposing tyranny and hierarchy
Fled Paris’ persecution for the village of Ferny. Applied his intelligence to build up the village’s industry and made it rich. A statue of Voltaire still stands in the town square.
Became friends with famous rulers like Russia’s Catherine the Great and Prussia’s Frederick the Great, yet was often in trouble with them for his anti-monarchist view
A “serial monogamist,” Voltaire lived with a series of brilliant woman and learned from their ideas.
Voltaire is not spotlighted in our textbook; to include him in your term paper, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/
Quotes from Voltaire:
·"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
·“In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give it to the other.”
·"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
·"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
·“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."
·"True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others."
·“All the reasoning of men is not worth one sentiment of woman.”
Takeaways from Voltaire:
Stick with the truth! Persecution and imprisonment are passing.
Wit and humor are signs of a gentle soul;
they can enable you to tell the truth and be accepted even when the truth is hard to take.
So be compassionate!
Existentialism
Some of the main themes in existentialism are: (1) Traditional and academic philosophy is sterile and remote from real life. (2) Philosophy must focus on the individual in his or her confrontation with the world. (3) The world is irrational, beyond total comprehension or accurate philosophical conceptualization. (4) The world is absurd: there is no explanation why it is the way it is. (5) Senselessness, triviality, separation, and so on, pervade human existence, causing anxiety, dread, self-doubt, and despair. (6) One faces the necessity of choosing how to live within this absurd and irrational world. This is the existential predicament.
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are important forerunners of existentialism. They held that philosophical systems that seek to make everything seem rational fail because not everything is. Such systems are futile attempts to overcome pessimism and despair.
Kierkegaard opposed the Hegelian view of the world’s utter rationality. Philosophy must speak to anguished existence in an irrational world, and Kierkegaard viewed with disdain philosophy’s concern with ideal truths and abstract metaphysics. The earth is a place of suffering, fear, and dread. The central philosophical problem is sickness-unto-death; only subjective commitment to God can grant relief.
Attempts to find the answer to despair spread into arts, literature, and culture generally (as found, for instance, in art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and in the literature of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett), and persist in philosophy.
Albert Camus We mask despair in an absurd world with false optimism and self-deception. We are strangers to ourselves. The world defeats our most fundamental needs. When we see this, the basic question is, Is there any reason not to commit suicide? Yet suicide is an unacceptable acquiescence. Only by struggling against the absurdity of life is it possible to give life meaning and value. The individual must spend life fighting the “plague” of injustice and violence through measured and nonfanatical revolt.
In The Stranger, Camus’ first novel, published in 1942, Meursault is a stranger even to himself, though the events of the story point to the possibility of authentic existence.
The Plague, first published in 1947, tells the allegorical story of the fight of an Algerian town against a deadly epidemic; in that very fight life has dignity and meaning in the face of absurd death.
Jean-Paul Sartre Camus was agnostic. Sartre was atheistic. Sartre: Man is abandoned; that is, God does not exist. Implications of abandonment: (1) There is no common human nature or essence; existence precedes essence; you are what you make of yourself. (2) There is no ultimate reason why things are the way they are and not some other way. (3) Because there is no divine plan there is no determinism: human beings are free. (4) There is no objective standard of values. Hence, we are responsible for what we are and must choose our own values. And in doing so we choose for all. We experience our responsibility in anguish or hide from it in bad faith. Only through acceptance of our responsibility and in choosing a fundamental life project may we live in authenticity. You Are What You Do. Persons create themselves through their choices. The choices that count are those that issue forth in actions. There is no hidden or “true self” behind those deeds.
Nausea, Sartre’s first novel, published in 1938, shows Roquentin’s visceral reaction to what he sees the meaninglessness of life; Being and Nothingness is an exposition of Sartre’s own philosophy.
Martin Heidegger For Heidegger the truth of things lies not in phenomena but in Being itself. Being itself has been reduced to a world of objects (i.e., it has been forgotten). We are basically ignorant about the thing that matters most: the true nature of Being. Awareness of the priority of Being would require a new beginning for philosophy and for Western civilization.
In his first major work, Being and Time (1927), still sought true knowledge in a priori structures found in the human mind. But later, after his “turning about,” he sought a direct approach to Being itself. It is with respect to his earlier work that Heidegger is called an existentialist. But despite the superficial resemblance, Heidegger and Sartre are philosophically quite different. For Heidegger, Being is the basic principle of philosophy and is absolutely necessary; for Sartre, individual existence was of paramount importance and because of the nonexistence of God, nothing about Being is necessary.
There Heidegger was concerned with Sinn (sense or meaning), the absence of which was the problem of human existence. The cultural and intellectual poverty of the twentieth century is the result of the assumption that man is the measure of all things; an idea, entrenched in Western civilization since the pre-Socratic Sophist Protagoras, that found its fullest expression in Nietzsche.
Heidegger was a Nazi since his youth and spoke out in favor of Hitler. After Hitler's defeat, Heidegger was silent on the subject. Does advanced intellectualism in itself guarantee personal moral character and ethical insight? Nope.
Moral Philosophy: This is a survey of the assigned reading in the text, with some issues omitted and others added. Here we return to many of the philosophers whom we have looked at, this time for their views on ethics.
Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the study of moral judgments, which are value judgments about what is virtuous and base, just and unjust, morally right and wrong, morally good and bad or evil, morally proper and improper, and so on.
Because many questions can be asked about moral judgments, ethics encompasses many issues. The most important question of ethics, however, is simply, Which moral judgments are correct?
The modern growth of sociopathy
For those writing their term projects on ethics: consider these issues. For a corporate CEO who makes a profitable product that’s harmful – or a politician who makes war for profit – What are their possible thought processes, if they are not sociopaths?
Please note that it’s established that normal brain function includes moral and ethical sensitivity. A person who does not have this (serial killers, some politicians, etc) is not a normal human. Sociopaths who undergo brain scans are shown not to have this moral center in the brain.
Unfortunately many large and powerful institutions are influenced by sociopaths and their enablers. That’s why studies are published that go against the idea that human beings are naturally moral.
“Moral knowledge is not possible” - an idea popular among subjectivists
Ethical skepticism: The doctrine that moral knowledge is not possible.
Individual Relativism: What is right or wrong morally is what each individual believes is right or wrong. This is a subjectivist ethical philosophy.
Descriptive Relativism: Not a doctrine of ethics, it merely says that people in different cultures have different beliefs about what is morally right and wrong; it says nothing about what is morally right and wrong.
Cultural relativism
The idea that what a culture believes is morally right or wrong is morally right or wrong for people in that culture.
This is a relativistic ethical outlook, sometimes mistakenly called a “philosophy.”
Two Kinds of Hedonism
Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure.
Two varieties of ethical hedonism:
Egoistic ethical hedonism (one ought to seek his or her own pleasure over other things).
Universalistic ethical hedonism (otherwise known as Utilitarianism, in which one ought to seek the greatest pleasure – the greatest good – for the greatest number of people).
Divine-command ethics: God ordains what one ought to do (examples: Augustine and Aquinas).
Consequentialism: One ought to do whatever has the most desirable consequences (Epicureans, stoics, utilitarians).
Deontological ethics: One must do one’s moral duty (in most cases, regardless of consequences) (Kant). Ethics are defined by one’s intentions.
Virtue ethics: One ought to do what a virtuous person would do (Plato, Aristotle).
Relativism: One ought to do what her or his culture or society thinks one ought to do. (No real philosopher is a relativist, but many students are!)
Why are no philosophers relativists, while many people in general accept relativism?
Relativism is always a fallacy. Why do people so easily accept relativistic fallacies, especially in the moral area?
The Early Greeks on Ethics:
Both the Sophists and Socrates taught that moral judgments must be supported by reason.
Socrates was also concerned with the meaning of words that signify moral virtues, such as justice, piety, and courage.
Socrates: Wrong behavior is due to ignorance. Intelligent people always do the right thing because they understand the consequences.
[Not in text: The only harm you can really do is harm to your own soul. When you hurt someone, that’s what you’re doing.]
Plato on Ethics
Theory of Forms: At the apex of all Forms is the Form of the Good.
Corollary: Because the Forms define true reality, individual things are real only insofar as they partake of the Form of the Good.
Additional corollary: Evil is unreal.
Because Forms are apprehended by reason, one should strive for knowledge of the Good and hence be ruled by reason.
One ruled by reason exhibits four cardinal virtues—temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice—and has a well-ordered soul; virtue is its own reward.
Aristotle on Ethics
Aristotle held that our highest good—our natural objective—is happiness.
[Not in text: He stated that happiness lies in finding out what does well, and then doing it for the benefit of all.]
Though both Plato and Aristotle were proponents of virtue ethics, for Plato, the Good is an immaterial Form; for Aristotle, the good is what human beings actually seek (happiness).
For Plato, the moral good transcends nature; for Aristotle the moral good finds its grounding in human nature.
Epicureanism on Ethics
Personal pleasure is the highest good.
We ought to seek the pleasant life, which comes with satisfaction of desires that are natural and the satisfaction of which is necessary for a pleasant life.
Natural desires that need not be satisfied may be satisfied if doing so does not lead to discomfort or pain.
Unnatural/unnecessary desires ought never to be satisfied.
[Not in text: Again, the problem is defining pleasure; what’s pleasurable to one person may be painful or disgusting to another. Philosophies based on pleasure have become so hard to define that they may be considered outdated, or not having kept up with mankind’s psychological evolution.]
The Stoics on Ethics
We ought to seek the untroubled life, which comes through acceptance of the natural order of things.
All that occurs is in accordance with natural law (reason):
Whatever happens is the inevitable outcome of the logic of the universe;
all that happens has a reason;
so whatever happens is for the best.
We ought to remain uninvolved emotionally in our fate, and our lives will be untroubled.
Epictetus was among the most famous Stoic teachers.
The most famous Stoic writer was Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
St. Thomas Aquinas on Ethics
He adapted Aristotelian thought for Christianity.
Goodness for humans is happiness. Natural law is the law of reason, which leads us to our natural goal if we follow it.
God’s divine law, revealed to us through God’s grace, guides us to happiness everlasting.
There are two sets of virtues: the natural virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, and the higher virtues of faith, love, and hope.
Hume
Can there be ethics after Hume?
See the text for how he showed logically that ethics cannot be based on logic or revelation. That left the philosophers of his time with four options:
(1) Despite Hume, ethics might seek to establish that morality can be grounded on reason or on God— Kant’s option was reason.
(2) Ethical thinkers might try to find objective sources of moral standards other than reason or God, such as on ideas of social contract or general agreement—the Utilitarians’ option.
(3) They might seek to determine how one should act given the absence of objective moral standards—the existentialists’ option.
(4) They might abandon the search for moral standards altogether and concentrate on ethical descriptivism, i.e. just describing and not evaluating what people think is right and wrong—the option of analytic philosophy. This is no longer a humanistic philosophy because it dismisses the question of what is right or wrong.
Hume. Hmmmmmmm.
Aaaand now -- KANT, ETHICS AND RIGHTS! Kant’s Duty Ethics
In Kant's view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth
is not the outcome achieved by the action,
but the motive behind the action.
The only motive that can endow an act with moral value
is one that arises from universal principles discovered by reason.
Duty is the supreme origin of moral action.
One needs Reason to be able to make moral decisions.
A poisonous snake can’t be blamed for killing; it has no reason.
A good reason for a moral decision isn’t subjective; it has to be universal –
otherwise why would we try to persuade each other of it?
The Categorical Imperative is Kant's famous statement of this duty:
Act only according to principles that you believe should become universal laws.
So if you’re thinking about cheating, for example –
can you believe that cheating should be universally allowed?
In other words- nothing you do can be moral
unless you can show it applies to everyone at all times & places.
Can you commit suicide out of love?
No way. A defense of suicide cannot be universalized.
IN ADDITION – Reason shows is that it is everyone’s duty
to protect the rights and dignity of all --
--and that no one should ever be used as a means to an end.
– an Enlightenment idea.
To Kant,
morality is founded on reason just as science is founded on reason.
The Categorical Imperative:
“Act only according to maxims which you can will also to be universal laws.”
Kant’s ethics are based on DUTY.
Kant’s idea of DUTY reinforces the idea that people have RIGHTS –
another Enlightenment idea.
HUMAN RIGHTS
In the ancient world, there were some glimmerings of the idea
that there were some things rulers should not be allowed to do to people.
Cyrus of Persia established some rights principles
but they did not live beyond his culture’s history.
Hebrew Prophets frequently took Hebrew kings to task for treating people wrongly.
Rome gave its citizens some protections.
But after the fall of Rome,
Europe was dominated by the idea that the ruler got his authority from God
and therefore could basically do no wrong.
This idea held until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
John Locke’s teaching was that each individual
was intellectually endowed with reason,
and therefore people are equal.
This gives the ruler no divine right to have his way with people
People have rights. This idea took over the world gradually.
They are “endowed by their creator” with rights.
But this doesn’t mean God gave them rights: rights come from Nature.
Kant:
Reason shows is that it is everyone’s duty
to protect the rights and dignity of all --
--and that no one should ever be used as a means to an end.
Morality is founded on reason just as science is founded on reason.
World War II showed the consequences
of trying to pretend that people don’t have rights.
After the war came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Although power-possessors keep trying to take people’s rights away,
the principles of human rights are universally acknowledged today.
Chapter 11: Moral and Political Philosophy
Hobbes on Ethics
He espoused a philosophy of relentless materialism.
There is no natural moral law. “Good” and “evil” denote only what one desires or detests. Morality is thus a quirk of the individual. But it is natural for one to preserve himself/herself at all costs.
A wise person recognizes that a state ruler has absolute power. Thus the wise person surrenders his or her rights to that authority, which he called the "Leviathan."
One should respect one's contracts to others and to the society as a whole; the rational basis of society is this social contract, agreed to by all sensible citizens
Hobbes said that all rulers rule by "force and fraud." That's just the way it is.
Hobbes’ views, like Nietzsche’s, have been used to support
Nihilism
Misanthropy
Sociopathy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was Swiss, which made him love democracy
His influence was most felt in France
The idea of “the noble savage” originates with Rousseau
So does the slogan of the French Revolution: “Liberty, equality, fraternity”
“Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”
He often lived hand to mouth and had great difficulties early in life, yet wrote for Diderot’s Encyclopedia and composed a successful opera
Wrote highly popular books on what kind of changes were needed for society, including novels
A radical thinker: 3 major ideas
--Civilization is not a good thing; nature is better
--Feeling should replace reason as our guide to life
--Humanity has a “general will” which every individual must obey
Society corrupts people and forces them to repress their feelings
Children are taught to have fake smiles and to pretend to think and feel things that they don’t
We must change education from memorization to developing a child’s potential
A loving family is a better environment for this kind of education than a school
God exists, and is beyond all reasoning – we cannot prove God’s existence, and so what?
Religion should be based on feeling, not thinking
Emotions of awe and reverence flow naturally out of the heart when one contemplates God
Those emotions should be the basis of one’s relationship with God
The “general will” on a subject: establish it by popular vote. Then give officials absolute power to make it happen.
Government’s purpose is to impose the general will. The idea was used by Communism and Fascism.
Rousseau’s is the opposite of Locke’s approach: Locke said that government’s purpose is to protect individual rights.
However, Rousseau did declare that citizens always have the right of revolution and can overturn and replace its rulers.
Takeaways from Rousseau:
“Civilization” is not necessarily your friend
Emotions are a good thing
Life is actually more emotional than rational, and that’s good! (Compare Hume, who said basically the same thing.)
David Hume's Game-Changer on Ethics
Hume was as skeptical as Hobbes about morals, but not misanthropic.
He stated that moral principles are neither divine edicts nor discoverable by reason.
Value judgments, he concluded, are based on emotion, not reason.
Goodness consists in traits and actions that promote the welfare of people (this idea was taken up in the nineteenth century by Mills, Bentham and the other Utilitarians). All humans have positive emotional responses to goodness.
When someone is morally praised or condemned, it is the person’s moral character that we're considering. In the respect that he sees moral character as a foundation of life, Hume is part of the virtue ethics tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.
Locke
We are all God's property. God created us with natural rights, and we are obliged to respect those rights.
We entrust our rights to the state, and the just state rules only with the prior consent of the governed.
The state is the servant of the people. The basis of government is law, not force or fraud.
Government should be separated into three independent branches to preserve justice.
U.S. constitutional theory: philosophy in practice
No nation has every attempted to set up its governmental structures in such close adherence to philosophical principles.
The US was founded in the spirit of supporting and protecting equal rights and guaranteed liberties.
The Declaration of Independence declares belief in "the Laws of Nature and nature's God."
The people have the right to alter or abolish any form of government that fails to protect people's rights.
Morality in Kant
Kant saw religion declining fast and wanted to protect mankind’s moral sense. So he made it his project to show that morality could be based on pure reason and did not require revelation.
Kant held that reason alone can ascertain principles of morality; they cannot be revealed through scientific investigation since scientific inquiry can never reveal to us principles which we know hold without exception (as moral principles do).
He observed that there are many things we know intuitively or innately that we could never reason our way to. The basics of morality are included. Where do such things exist? In the noumenal realm, outside the phenomenal realm: beyond the senses and ultimately even beyond the grasp of the intellect.
The supreme principle of morality for Kant:A moral rule is universal and absolute. Thus, the supreme prescription of morality is to act in such a way that you could, rationally, see the principle on which you act to be a universal law.
A moral rule may be expressed as a “categorical imperative.”
Why you should do what you should do:
You should do what you should do because it is right.
The consequences of an act do not determine whether the act is good; only the intent or “will” with which it is done does that.
Rationality is the source of all value, so the rational will is alone inherently good.
Because a moral imperative must hold without exception, it differs from a “hypothetical imperative” which states that one ought to do somethingifsuch-and-such an end is desired.
Another formulation of the categorical imperative: Treat rational beings (e.g., humans) in every instance as ends and never just as means.This supports Human Rights.
Duty-based ethical systems such as Kant’s are known as “deontological” ethical systems (Greekdeont- that which is binding). The duty-based approach also supports Human Rights – we have a duty to treat others well.
Utilitarians
A different view was taken by the Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
In Utilitarianism, the rightness of an action is identical with the happiness it produces as a consequence, with everyone considered.
Bentham:Happiness is pleasure, and positive ethical value-words have meaning only when defined in terms of pleasure.
Mill: Some pleasures are better than others; quality, as well as quantity, of pleasure is a factor in moral value.
Morality in Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche
From the relatively benign influence of Hegel –
To the extremely mixed influence of Marx and Nietzsche –
Philosophy formed major social movements of the 20th century.
Hegel taught the three-part movement of history.
Marx made this into the inevitability of worker rule.
Nietzsche preached that the strong individual has the right to take whatever he pleases.
This led to Nazism and other forms of fascism,
as well as to semi-sociopathic worldviews such as Ayn Rand's.
Hegel
History must be brought to bear in any attempt to create a philosophy.
Mind and spirit are what everything is made of, including Nature.
Evolution of self-awareness: when humanity’s mind and spirit become completely aware of themselves, peace will arrive.
This means the more we understand ourselves, the more we can reach a conflict-free state. This means our human essence is not about conflict, but about harmony.
“Spirit” or “mind” is the origin of everything, including Nature.
This substance, and this process, is called “Geist.” The word means something halfway between Mind and Spirit.
“Zeitgeist” means “spirit of the age.”
Change is always intelligible, never chaotic or random.
All change proceeds in three stages:
Thesis
Antithesis
Synthesis
Thesis: something comes to be.
Antithesis: the reaction to whatever it was that came to be. The Antithesis “battles” or contradicts the Thesis.
Synthesis: the two combine with each other—forming a new Thesis.
Then comes a new Antithesis, etc. The process can only stop when a conflict-free state of being is achieved.
In Hegel’s vision, the individual is ALIENATED from society because of the constant conflict all around—even though he has created this society himself!
The conflict exists because the Geist has not reconciled itself to its own unity. When this happens, the individual can finally know himself/herself, and be free.
Individuals are always motivated to keep changing things until the Geist reaches its conflict-free destiny. This is the purpose of Alienation.
Hegel: Left & Right
In Hegel’s vision, the Prussian state of his own time was ideal.
Among his students were Right Hegelians who believed in traditional power and authority coming from aristocracies and the strong. This philosophy combined with Nietzsche’s to promote Nazism.
Left Hegelians gathered under Marx to promote the revolutionary socialist state run by the workers. This led to communism.
Hegel himself could not have favored either of these future developments.
Hegel’s idea was that every human being fundamentally desires to overcome others.
(Hegel obviously did not understand the traditional feminine viewpoint that people are more about cooperation than competition.)
Hegel felt that slaves are only conquered because they are not willing to fight to the death.
So Hegel believed that you cannot be conquered unless you already decide you can be.
Tell this to the victims of snipers and ambushes and roadside IED bombs.
Hegel felt that slaves gradually come to an intuition that they can overcome,
because they see that the result of their hard work is to accomplish things of value.
So they can work had on destroying their masters and accomplish it!
This is an idea from Hegel that Marx applied to his ideology of revolutionary communism.
I don’t call it a philosophy because Marx himself didn’t. It exists not to seek wisdom but control and domination.
“Bildung” in Hegel is self-building education. It’s the source of all progress.
A slave who accepts the approved Christian ideology is not practicing Bildung.
He ceases to fight and struggle and accepts his master.
Hegel believes that Bildung makes the Great Man. He though that the Great Man embodies the State. Like Napoleon.
Isn’t this like Nietzsche?
Hegel Takeaways
1. Reality is a HISTORICAL process, not a static one. Change is of its essence.
2.Change can be understood; it is not chaotic.
3. Alienation: humans feel estranged from things around them that they have accepted or even created themselves.
Karl Marx
Marx was violently anti-religious (religion was “the opium of the people”) and spent his entire life writing and doing things to provoke the overthrow of governments and the end of religion.
He combined Hegel’s dialectic with English economic theory and French political ideas; he didn’t study that much philosophy beyond Hegel.
While Hegel said that ultimate reality was spiritual, Marx claimed that everything was matter and caused by material things.
Thus Marxism is called “dialectical materialism.”
The basic fact of everyone’s life is what he/she does for a living. Thus economics us the ultimate social reality.
In Marx, the individual is ALIENATED from his place in the economy as an oppressed worker. For Marx, the process can only END with the ideal state.
This conflict-free state arrives when the working classes have taken over completely from any form of aristocracy.
Until then, constant “class struggle” is necessary.
However - Marxist states have always been dominated by powerful dictators, never by “workers’ councils.”
Power possessors are those who know how to take and keep power -- this time in the name of the people.
Resistance to dictatorships spelled the end of Marxism in the former Soviet Union.
Because Marxist governments regimes run their economies and markets by command from the top, their economies have tended to stop being creative.
China and Vietnam have modified their Marxism to allow for some marketplace freedom, and their economies have grown.
North Korea has a dictated economy or “command economy,” and poverty is overwhelming the country. Cuba is in a similar situation.
According to Marx. the process of workers taking over countries is absolutely objectively true and necessary. Anyone who disagrees with it is denying reality and is just wrong.
This is why Marxists have had few qualms about executing anyone who has disagreed with them.
Compare Augustine of Hippo’s idea of the “saved” as deserving to live and everyone else being expendable.
Marx: “Human history consists of successive stages of development of various means of production.”
Human needs gradually develop for means of production that go against existing “productive relations” or established institutions or practices.
For example, humanity now needs new sources of energy. But the fossil fuel industry is the established means. Therefore that industry suppresses new means of energy production.
The fundamental conflict of capitalist society: production is socialized, but ownership is not.
Everyone is forced by the need for money to participate in production.
But ownership is not allowed to be taken up by everyone.
Workers generally do not own the factories where they work.
Everyone is dominated by the need for money.
What is the only necessity for life that is not bought and sold? The air we breathe.
Debt is socialized, but profits are privately held.
Profits are made possible by roads, education, laws, police, etc., which are paid for by everyone.
But profits that are made because of these support structures are held privately.
The longer capitalism lasts, the more wealth is accrued by a smaller and smaller number of people.
This is the income inequality we are now seeing and which many are saying is tearing away at the fabric of the US and the capitalist world.
Workers never own what they produce. This makes them become devalued in their own eyes.
The sole function of political power is the exploitation of one economic class by another.
(Voltaire said that the art of politics lies in the transfer of money from one class to another.)
Marx - Takeaways
What you do for a living is one of the most important things about you.
The government that you vote for, or approve, should keep the strong from abusing the poor and weak.
Hegel and Marx: Overview
Hegel’s idea that a society free of conflict can eventually evolve through nonviolent change is a deeply spiritual concept.
Hegel’s vision is called “Absolute Idealism.” It is profoundly optimistic.
Marx’s vision is also idealistic, but it has extreme violence and vengeance as necessary components.
Chapter 13, Philosophy and Belief in God: Main Points from Assigned Readings Chapter introduction: Religious commitment involves philosophical beliefs. The philosophy of religion attempts to understand and rationally evaluate these beliefs. In contrast to theology, it does not make religious assumptions in doing so. The beliefs of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition have received the most discussion by Western philosophers.
Anselm:
Though he thought it impossible to reason about God or God’s existence without already believing in God, Anselm was willing to evaluate on its own merit and independently of religious assumptions the idea that God does not exist.
Anselm’s ontological argument attempts to show that disbelief in God entails self-contradiction.
“If you can think of a being greater than the greatest being you can think of, that shows that you actually believe in the greatest being you can think of!” If you accept this wordplay, you accept the ontological argument.
Thomas Aquinas: “Evil” Does Not Exist
In school he was known a the “Dumb Ox” Became known as a brilliant professor Eventually he resided in a monastery and never left his room Wrote highly rational systematic theology Reconciled Aristotle with the Bible Stopped writing after having mystic visions Called all his writing “nothing but straw”
Declared official theologian of Roman Catholic Church
In Aquinas, the battle between good & evil is a fiction, a story we tell ourselves because we love drama – but there are no such opposing forces. He reasoned that existence is inherently good, and that what we call “evil” is only a matter of the good being missing or ignored.
Like Socrates & Plato, he said that what is, is good. “Evil” is just the lack of a “due good.” In other words, evil is unreal. It‘s only a “hole” in the good.
Evil is not an independent force
and has no energy of its own. It’s just a sign that something is missing.
Thomas Aquinas’ Conclusion
He’s called the foremost theologian of the Church – yet after having mystic visions near the end of his life, Aquinas said, "I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw."
Takeaways from Aquinas
(1) Reason can strengthen faith. (2) Ultimately, reason is of less value than spiritual experience. (3) There is no evil per se. It’s just that sometimes the good that should be there is missing. No one is evil; some people are just missing something.
Mysticism and Juliana of Norwich
“God came to me,” says the mystic, but is such experience a reliable form of knowledge?
Only if it improves your life and your understanding.
Juliana denied that there is any meaningful difference in the validity of mystical revelations made directly to our soul and knowledge derived through reason.
We can know God only partly through revelation; further knowledge comes through loving God.
For Juliana, God lives in us and we in God;
we are one with God and are nurtured and fed knowledge of God and of ourselves by this divine parent.
(This is close to what the rationalist and skeptic Bishop George Berkeley believed centuries later.)
We can love God more by loving our own souls.
The knowledge God gives to the mystics can provide reasons
for ordinary people to have hope in the midst of wars, plagues, and religious disputes.
Kierkegaard
For Søren Kierkegaard, God is beyond the grasp of reason,
and the idea that God came to us as a man in the person of Jesus
is intellectually absurd; yet to Kierkegaard, this absurdity
is in itself good reason to believe.
Truth is subjective; it lies not in what we believe, but in how we live.
We must commit ourselves to God
not through a search for objective truth (as if it would give meaning to life)
but through a leap of faith: a non-intellectual, passionate commitment to Christianity.
The objective uncertainty of God is essential to a true faith in Him.
What was Kierkegaard's objection to Aristotle,
who said that what makes people human is their ability to reason?
Kierkegaard said that instead, the essential thing about people is their ability to ___.
Chapter 14: Feminism and Philosophy
Because philosophy is the search for truth and wisdom, it is often one of the first fields in which the oppressed express themselves as soon as they are able.
Feminist philosophy arose as soon as women gained enough rights to be regarded as individuals with the same capabilities as males.
In the first wave of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was one of the first statements of the obvious and egregious ways in which women had been deprived of the natural regard due every human.
In the second wave, women began to define attitudes and abilities that are essentially female. This has been called "essentialism." They began to identify patriarchal patterns as having pervaded and dominated society for milennia. Paternal ownership of property and its dominator model have pervaded politics, economics, culture, religion, education and more, at the expense of women and children, as well as at the expense of gentleness, caring, communication and relationship. Both liberal feminism and radical feminism are part of the second wave.
The third wave of feminism has included a wide variety of sectarian approaches to feminism. Feminist moral theory is more personal, subjective and relationship-oriented than mainstream society's logic and reason-based moral theory coming from Kant, traditional legal reasoning and criminal justice policy.
Back to Ch 13: Mary Daly Do you feel that many people who think of God still picture an old bearded white man?
The stereotype images from Michelangelo certainly depict God as such.
Mary Daley believes that this image is very pervasive and damaging to the worldview we share. To revise the false image of God passed on to us by institutions such as organized religions, we need to change: The God who demands suffering The God who judges and condemns The God who creates false consciences and unnecessary guilt.
The only real God is Love.
Ch 14: Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings
Gilligan is known as the founder of "difference feminism.”
She believed that women have different moral tendencies than men:
that men think in terms of rules and justice,
while women think in terms of caring and relationships.
Gilligan’s primary focus came to be on moral development in girls.
She formed a new psychology for women by listening to them and rethinking the meaning of self and selfishness.
She outlines three stages of moral development, starting from selfishness, then progressing to social or conventional morality, and finally to post- conventional or principled morality.
What is the difference between conventional morality and principled morality? It may be conventional to say that an act is right because it’s traditional and common practice, while a principled person may have to reject that act because of their higher standards.
Women must learn to tend to their own interests as well as the interests of others.
She thinks that women hesitate to judge, because they see the complexities of relationships.
Noddings, like Rousseau. is concerned with education in caring and morality.
In her first major book Caring (1984), she explored a feminine approach to ethics and moral education.
Her argument starts from the position that care is basic in human life, and that all people want to be cared for.
In her book Starting at Home: Caring Social Policies, she writes about the environment in which children learn.
When children have parents and teachers who care, they learn how to care themselves.
This allows them to build an ethical ideal: a dependable, caring self.
We learn to care about others through our experience of being cared for.
Instead of starting with an ideal state or republic, care theory starts with an ideal home and moves outward - 'learning first what it means to be cared for, then to care for intimate others, and finally to care about those we cannot care for directly.”
TAKEAWAYS FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF CARING
Because of the social conditioning of men and women to be different from each other
(men oriented to rules and justice, women to love and caring), there is often a difference in the ways men and women interpret the same situation.
Society, as Rousseau insisted, corrupts the individual, who is born with a purity.
Men have dominated society through economics and politics for thousands of years, and therefore society has become dominated by justice rather than caring.
When women take care of themselves, of each other, and of other people,
exercising their natural compassion, in a society that gradually allows women to be more free, then women are preparing the next major shift in humanity: closer to the rule of love than to the rule of law.
Principal Causes of Moral Failure according to the Philosophy of Caring
1. Greed for wealth to the detriment of others.
2. Lust for power over the lives of others.
3. Desire for vengeance, whether in the name of:
-honor -justice -retribution -closure -payback
All of the above, though they are part of some cultures and are often considered acceptable, have been specifically opposed by humanity’s major philosophers and spiritual prophets, because of their terrible consequences that can last generations.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." --Gandhi
Post-Colonial Thought Because of their shared experience of domination, Third World peoples share a general revolutionary consciousness. Postcolonial thought deals with dislocations caused by conquerors whose imperialism aimed at near-total domination
As with Feminism, when a huge systemic injustice begins to be removed, there is an outburst of original thought. Philosophy as consciousness-raising about injustice and domination Third world thought is often Marxist in theory Models of colonization: Spain, Portugal, Britain, France. The United States is the most active imperial power remaining in the world
Aspects of colonization: --Violent subjugation of indigenous peoples --Introduction of colonizers’ beliefs into traditional societies --Economic domination and exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor See the film The Mission about “good guys” within the Spanish Catholic colonial power in South America Read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins about the covert actions of the World Bank and IMF
Africa Pan-African philosophy
Oral traditions are being put into writing for the first time and discussed by people outside the originating cultures
This results in insight into tribal philosophy about metaphysics, epistemology, semiotics, ethics, etc.
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Poet, philosopher and post-colonial President of his nation, Senegal
Studied philosophy in France; France was the major colonist of West Africa
Senghor tried to show that socialism was a better match for the African consciousness than capitalism
To the person of “negritude” or blackness, knowledge of an object is achieved through acts of love and identification, emotionally.
The African doesn’t ask “Do you understand me?” Rather, “Do you feel me?”
This quality is superior to the European method of analytical reasoning.
This gentle participation in the act of knowing gives the person of negritude an advantage over the European mode.
The person of negritude is better equipped for a positive human future.
Bob Marley
In Ethiopia, from the time of the Resurrection, Christianity developed separately and independently from the Church in Europe
Ethiopians were taken to Jamaica as slaves and developed their own offshoot of the Ethiopian Orthgodox Church
This developed into Rastafarianism, a culture, religion and philosophy of multiracial peace, harmony and love Marley expressed this philosophy far and wine through music until he died of a possible poisoning
Desmond Tutu Anti-apartheid activist; like King, a Christian clergyman Worked with Mandela and the African National Congress party to democratize South Africa. now one of the world’s most hopeful nations The concept of humaneness: everyone must have the freedom to become fully human, and apartheid (a hate-based system) made this impossible both for blacks and whites. Africans corrupted by the west are losing the quality of Ubantu, or being human, because it includes sharing. “I loathe capitalism because it gives far too great play go our inherent selfishness.”
Nelson Mandela Undeniably one of the greatest leaders of our time. Attorney, activist, journalist, went directly from 28 years in prison to become the first fairly elected president of his country.\Visited the US during the Civil Rights movement and learned from Gandhi and King. Was designated by Ronald Reagan as a terrorist. Through the Truth and Reconciliation process, white oppressors were allowed to confess and instead of being punished were invited to apply to take their former positions in government.
The Americas
In Central and South America, Toltecs, Incas and Aztecs met a far more powerful and more bloodthirsty adversary in the Christian Spanish
Genocidal aggression reduced Native American tribes in North America to life on reservations, with their way of life taken away
The Iroquois Confederacy: its influence on the U.S. Constitution In 1987 the U.S. Senate passed a resolution saying that “the confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself.”
The Iroquois place the creation of their constitution at between 1000 and 1400 A.D. From a historical blog: "The first Righteous Constitution (or: 'Law of the Land') ever to exist in Human History, was created by the Iroquois Confederacy's ratification council in 1142 A.D., August 31, shortly after a total eclipse of the sun, when it was adopted by the Senecas (the last of the five nations to ratify it), at a site that is now a football field in Victor, New York." http://gettingtruth.blogspot.com/2007/07/iroquois-influenced-united-states.html In 1754 Benjamin Franklin asked a gathering of American colonial delegates to use the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for the U.S. Articles of Confederation. In the 1990s an economic resurgence began to create better days for Indian Country
African American Thought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: social justice Martin Luther King Jr. was a Boston University Ph.D. in theology and a third-generation Baptist preacher. Dr. King studied Gandhi and Thoreau and sought to accomplish his goals nonviolently. He was assassinated one year to the day after he began speaking out for peace and not civil rights alone. Called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." He was one of the “Three K’s” who opposed the Vietnam War, all assassinated from 1965-68.
Professor Cornel West: Social activism Cornel West: activist and philosophy professor. Urges creation of a more compassionate society. Points out that conventional thinking is the barrier to a better way of life.
Eastern Thought Hinduism is more a pervasive lifestyle and culture than a religion The caste system is the means through which the Hindu power structure exerts control of society
Philosophy: Reality is absolutely one Acceptance of Vedic scriptures, especially Upanishads Upanishads: Brahman and atman are one Consciousness is brahman “That art thou” The self is brahman I am brahman Samsara — the cycle of desire and suffering Karma — “action”; consequences build up through multiple lifetimes (transmigrations) Nirvana — permanent liberation from samsara and a merging into brahman
Islamic Philosophy Flourished in the centuries just after Mohammed Was part of Islam’s Golden Age Arab philosophers had huge impact on medieval Christians Avicenna Allah (God) is a Necessary Being Averroës Eternal creation Double truth?
Taoism Like Hinduism, more a pervasive lifestyle and culture than a religion Taoism consists of rituals and attitudes emerging long before Lao Tzu Lao Tzu is in a way the “savior” to emerge from Taoism Opposed to Confucius’ conservative ideology, which is not a philosophy Follow the Tao, the natural order of things, which gives rise to yin and yang Become a sage, cultivating tranquility, modesty, submission, selflessness Lao Tzu on Virtuous Activity: page 476 Lao Tzu on Government: page 477
Four extremely informative and readable books about Eastern philosophy: Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters
India Mohandas Gandhi Satyagraha (“clinging to truth”): the person “must become the change he seeks in the world.” Helped end discrimination against Indians in South Africa, then turned his attention to the British in India. It has been called “unbelievable and impossible” that nonviolence would drive the world’s strongest nation out of India. Did his best to end the caste system, yet it remains.
Rabindranath Tagore Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Poet, activist and master teacher. Humans must devote themselves to living the examined life. “A heart of love, a mind at its service that can cut like a knife, and in some sense the spirit of a child."
Joseph Campbell: Be Your Own Hero
Also see Joseph Campbell tab.
The all-time greatest scholar of mythology
Worked closely with Carl Gustav Jung, whom many call the most important of all psychologists and psychiatrists
Campbell has had a profound impact on the storytelling arts (film, TV, fiction) and thus influenced millions of people – see “The Writer’s Journey” - a book read by nearly every screenwriter
His work is the basis for George Lucas’ “Star Wars”
Humanity has been telling one story over and over: the story of the “Hero with a Thousand Faces”
This hero is called out of his/her Ordinary Reality into an adventure
In the adventure, he/she must face adversaries
The adversaries completely stop his/her quest
A messenger comes to get him started again
When he wins, he brings something new and precious back to the Ordinary Reality
If he loses, he’s an “anti-hero,” yet he still wins wisdom
This story exists in every culture through history
It contains truths that people identify with and live by
It is part of our “collective unconscious” – it is written in our DNA
Campbell presented and analyzed these ideas in many books and interviews
Studying him can help you become “the hero of your own journey.”
Topics in the course:
Western historical periods;
Chief People and Movements in Western Philosophy;
Buddha;
Moral Philosophy from the Greeks through Nietzsche;
Moral Philosophy in Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, others;
Moral and Political Philosophy from Hobbes through Marx and Anarchism;
Religion and Philosophy;
Feminism and Philosophy;
Existentialism, Structuralism and Deconstruction.
Arab Philosophy, Hinduism, Taoism;
Postcolonialism: Native American, South Asian and African Views.
Western Historical Periods
Ancient Times: up to 500 B.C.
Classical Antiquity: ancient Greece and Rome
Medieval Times: the “Dark Ages,” about 300 to 1300 a.d.
The Renaissance: 14th-17th centuries
The Enlightenment: Neoclassicism, 18th century
The Modern Age: Romanticism and Revolution, 19th – 20th centuries
The “Postmodern” age: what we live in now. What might be a better name for it?
Philosophy investigates not through authority or religion, but reasoning.
Heraclitus & PythagorasXenophanes & Parmenedes
Empedocles & the Four Elements;
He was convinced that behind concepts that are abstract but are real to us – such as Justice, Love, Beauty, Health, etc. – there must be some kind of abstract reality, existing invisibly but yet as real as matter.
Socrates & Morality
Takeaways for Socrates
Plato
Published 2 dozen "Platonic Dialogues", the chief of which are:The Republic: portrait of an ideal state
The Symposium: on the nature of love
Others are named after their chief characters: Parmenides, Timaeus, etc.
Some of his best Dialogues are accounts of Socrates’ trial & death – Crito, Apology, Phaedo.
Plato’s Theory of Forms
Plato & the Arts
Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s ideal society
Takeaways for Plato- Plato reinforces Socrates: don’t harm your soul!
- For your contemplation:
- Is there an underlying mathematical order to reality that we can apprehend with our intellects and feelings?
- Is there a metaphysical reality, invisible, that gives meaning to what we see here in our reality, even in
- California?
- The Cave: are we shrouded and chained in ignorance here on Earth, and prevented from seeing and living in a better reality?
AristotleHis idea of form
The Four Causes or “Be-Causes”
Aristotle & Alexander
Takeaways for AristotleThomas Aquinas: “Evil” Does Not Exist
In school he was known a the “Dumb Ox”
Became known as a brilliant professor
Eventually he resided in a monastery and never left his room
Wrote highly rational systematic theology
Reconciled Aristotle with the Bible
Stopped writing after having mystic visions
Called all his writing “nothing but straw”
Declared official theologian of Roman Catholic Church
In Aquinas, the battle between good & evil is a fiction,
a story we tell ourselves because we love drama
– but there are no such opposing forces.
He reasoned that existence is inherently good,
and that what we call “evil”
is only a matter of the good being missing or ignored.
Like Socrates & Plato, he said that what is, is good. “Evil” is just the lack of a “due good.”
In other words, evil is unreal.
It‘s only a “hole” in the good.
Evil is not an independent force
and has no energy of its own.
It’s just a sign that something is missing.
Thomas Aquinas’ Conclusion
He’s called the foremost theologian of the Church –
yet after having mystic visions near the end of his life, Aquinas said,
"I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw."
Takeaways from Aquinas
(1) Reason can strengthen faith.
(2) Ultimately, reason is of less value than spiritual experience.
(3) There is no evil.
It’s just that sometimes the good that should be there is missing.
No one is evil; some people are just missing something.
His Five Proofs assume that God is a person or being
rather than a quality, or a consciousness, or a force, or an energy.
It has always been easier for western people to relate to a person than to an energy.
DescartesAfter a thousand years of Church deception,
he became obsessed with the question of whether we could ever know anything for certain.
Started from square one & applied the principle of Universal Doubt
Even if an evil spirit could deceive him in every way, he would still know he himself existed.
“I think – therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) became his baseline.
Brilliant at math; invented the Graph, with its “Cartesian Coordinates”Loved math for its certainty; wondered how that certainty could be found in other areas
After deciding he was certain about his own existence, he decided he could be certain about God’s
To come to this conclusion, he used the Ontological Argument
Can we count on our senses at all?Start from an undeniable fact and proceed with logic one step at a time:
this became the core of scientific method
His conclusion that humans are essentially their minds
brought him to believe that all is DUALISM; mind vs. what mind perceives (matter).
The split between mind and non-mind is known as Cartesian Dualism.
It has dominated the western worldview for 300 years.
Thousands of experiments have proven Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
When the fundamental particles of matter and energy are observed by a human,
they change.
Has this ended the mind-matter split once and for all?
Before Socrates, philosophers asked, “What exists?”Socrates changed the main question to “How should we live?”
Descartes changed it again to “What do we know and how do we know it?”
(This is the "epistemological detour.")Have we forgotten Socrates’ question altogether, or what?
On Descartes -
How can the immaterial mind move the material body?
This is still debated.
Let's now ask -
Is the mind really immaterial? Is the body really material?
Maybe we don't really know what we're talking about when we say these things.If matter is energy and vice versa, don't we need a new way of discussing both?
Hobbes is in many ways the founder of the modern mechanistic scientific-type worldview.
He believed that everything was matter in motion, and there was nothing but matter.
He was also an extreme cynic who believed that humans are governed only by "force and fraud," and that life on earth is "nasty, brutish and short."
He was atheistic without quite saying so, and this was a hanging offense.
Hobbes managed to avoid persecution by saying, when asked if God exists, that "whatever the sovereign decides is right."
(Richard Nixon: "If the president does it, it's legal.")
So he put the question of God's existence off to the ruler, and got off the hook.
A person who says that spirit is nonsense, that all is matter, and that you should just obey your rulers - what would you make of such a man?
Why has he been such a popular thinker?
What attitudes does he encourage?
Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher in a Christian culture:
As a philosopher, he was unafraid to criticize basic things about the religion that gave him a degree of protection.
He was the first person in the West to do critical analysis of religious scripture - in his case of the Hebrew Bible.
This was risky business. Yet as a philosopher he knew it had to be done.
As for metaphysics, he applied reason to show that in reality there could not be a division between mind and matter as two types of substance,
but that there must be only one universal substance, which he identified as God. In other words he was a pantheist" "all is God."
The mind and the body are the same thing, conceptualized from different viewpoints.
When I see "me" as thinking, I'm looking at "me" as mind.
When I see "me" as walking, I'm seeing "me" as a body: as matter.
He attempted to out-do Descartes in creating a system of logical analysis of existence that would be completely certain in every way.
Insofar as his premises are unassailable, he succeeded. But no premise can be unassailable; at the best it can be highly probable.
Is the sun going to rise tomorrow? Probably. Not certainly.
(Besides, what do we mean by its "rising"?)
John Locke is one of the most influential philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, a person who has had enormous impact on modern thought.
He worked to establish great truths in both epistemology (the nature of the mind and learning) and in political and social thought.
Though Locke was English, he was a kind of American "founding father." Without his ideas -- no America.
Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Locke believed that all our ideas came from experience and the senses This position is called empiricism.
It contrasts with rationalism, which says that ideas can come from reason, the mind, without having to depend completely on the senses.
When we look at a basketball, all we are really seeing is our perceptions of that basketball within our minds.
If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, there is no sound. But there is still a tree falling.
See the box about Rationalism and Empiricism on page 113.
Descartes and Spinoza believed that the mind contains innate ideas known through reason; they are rationalists.
Locke and Berkeley believe that our impressions come not from innate ideas but from our experience; they are empiricists.
To know why particular ideas in philosophy are important, always remember their historical context.
One reason that Locke insisted our ideas come from our own experience was to contradict the medieval idea that our minds and everything else about us depend wholly on God.
Although he was not an atheist, Locke was trying to show that humans create their own destiny, their own fate, their own knowledge, their own societies.
Berkeley (pronounced "Barkley") took Locke's thinking further.
He pointed out logically that if we all we know of an object is our perceptions of it, then we do not have real knowledge that the object exists at all.
Size, shape, color, etc., are all ideas in the human mind, and we have no way of saying they actually exist in what we are observing.
All we can say is that we know our perceptions of it exist.
For that matter, how do we know that we're not dreaming those perceptions?
Such thought processes may seem to us rather pointless today, because after all, we can put shoe polish on shoes and make them browner and shinier, even if we cannot "prove" that they even exist.
Yet in the 17th and 18th centuries, such explorations were radical and controversial, and laid the foundation for modern psychology.
All of this careful and detailed "Age of Enlightenment" reasoning keeps leading to the inescapable idea that no matter how much we analyze and reason about the perception process, we cannot know anything for certain.
Berkeley brought God back into the equation of human knowledge, but in a mystical way.
Our minds all exist within the mind of God.
This does not return to the medieval church's worldview because it dos not make God into a dictator, a super-Pope inserting ideas into our minds.
Rather, God is the ground and atmosphere of our own experience.
Berkeley said we can be sure that objects exist, but actually as clusters of ideas, not as "material things."
The words "material things" show a mistake about the nature of reality.
"Materiality" as we have thought of it does not really exist.
Things which we mistake for "material things" of solid matter are actually spiritual entities.
They are real, for sure; they have a real existence--and that existence is in God's mind.
Berkeley also said that God speaks to us as individuals through our experiences.
Meditate on your experiences and you'll come to see what God is telling you.
Note the summary of mind-body theories at the bottom pf page 115:
In Descartes' dualism, there are matter and mind.
In Hobbes' materialism, there is only matter.
In Berkeley's idealism, there is no matter, only mind.
In Spinoza's "alternatism," there is one substance, which sometimes looks like mind, sometimes like matter, depending on the observer.
Which of these sounds most plausible to you? Why?
:-)
HINDUISM, BUDDHA AND EASTERN THOUGHT (many notes below on this subject are not in the textbook)
Hinduism is the background of Buddhism, just as Judaism is the background of Christianity.Hinduism is entrenched in the caste system (see 464), which may be the oldest skin-color-based racism in the world.
Hinduism is strictly patriarchal (like Roman Catholicism); women may be saints but never leaders.
The doctrines of karma, reincarnation and nirvana overlap with Buddhism (see p. 467).
Buddha:
1. Buddha did not believe that in nirvana, individual existence ceases.
He taught that the EGO ceases,but that the Essence carries on,
and that a person then has complete freedom of choice for the first time.
Without being trapped by an ego, a person can choose either
to merge with Infinity, or to be reborn to help others.
One who decides to stay in the world and assist others to find enlightenment
is called a "bodhisattva."
2. Buddha did not believe that the existence of evil was a block against belief in God.
He taught that evil was the result of human choice, not anything that the Divine is responsible for.
3. He also taught that the universe is pervaded with dharmakaya,
the divine essence that consists of active compassionate love
for all people and all being.
Dharmakaya is the Buddhist equivalent of God:
not a person, but a spiritual being.
Buddhism originates in India, then after 1000 years becomes only a remnant there
By A.D 1 it begins to become major force in China
From China it spreads east and becomes dominant in Asia
Lifestyle or religion? A debated topic
The Buddha: born as Siddartha Gautama Shakya, noble caste
Six-year search for enlightenment
Became enlightened, then called “the Buddha” or Awakened One
Dharma = Natural Law, not obedience to social class system
The Four Noble Truths:
1. Life is suffering until nirvana is attained
2. Suffering is caused by desire for things that oppose nirvana
3. Such desire must be eliminated
4. The eightfold path eliminates such desire
The Noble Eightfold Path:
Right view
Right intentions
Right speech
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right mindfulness
Right concentration
Afterlife:
Karma = actions recoil upon the doer
Transmigration = souls will be reborn in other bodies
Nirvana = an end to the cycle of rebirth when one is enlightened; then one has the choice as to whether to be reborn or not
Ethics: Harm nothing and no one, including yourself
Open to both genders, all castes, all ethnicities
Moderate asceticism (middle way)
Vegetarian diet, no drugs or alcohol
Nothing that impedes or "twists" consciousness should be usedDetachment = one views one’s problems from a distance
Compassion = concern for sufferings of others
Bodhisattva = one who remains in this world in order to help others
Sutras = stories, books
The 'Canon" of official accepted scripture was set several hundred years after Buddha by conventions of monks
Eastern philosophy tends to focus on the interior world,
while Western philosophy tends to focus on the exterior world, or objective reality.
Several factors forcing a shift in the west to the interior:
Heisenberg and quantum physics
The crisis of the breakdown of morality
Growing interest in self-realization and enlightenment
While Western religion has a great emphasis on historical events
such as the history of the Jews, the life of Jesus and the life of Mohammed,
Eastern religion focuses on the teachings and how to live them.
Eastern thought tends to be more philosophical and less historical.
Permanent reality lies behind the veil of illusion known as “maya.”
Our senses and our minds constantly mislead us into believing that what we perceive is the only reality.
Kant & Schopenhauer agreed that the material world only exists in our perceptions of it.
Buddha said there were no gods, that the priesthood is false,
that woman is man's equal, and that ritual is detrimental.
All of this included a condemnation of the caste system,
which is the most powerful and pervasive belief in all of India -
the basis of its social and economic system.
He was labeled a heretic but gained millions of followers.
(Eventually the Hindus marginalized him by making him into one of their gods.)
Today some Buddhists have their own priests, rituals and gods, in spite of the Buddha.
Zen Buddhism seems the closest to what Buddha taught.
Takeaways from Buddha:
The main thing is not what you know, it’s what you make of yourself with what you know.
Life is a burden consisting of suffering –
until we learn how to get our desires under control.
The human will is the only source of evil and suffering.
Desire enlightenment above all, and you’ll cease suffering.
Hinduism: the soul is a continuous reality, life after life.
Buddhism: the soul is not continuous, but changes with every incarnation,
sometimes merging with others or parts of others.
Have Western philosophers believed in reincarnation?
Some have stated their belief in it: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, the Church father Origen.
Most have had no comment on it – just as they’ve had no comment on the “heaven-hell” belief.
David Hume
Hume, an Irishman, was a humble man, yet brilliant.
Above all he wanted his philosophy to be realistic and practical,
yet he didn’t pull any punches in criticizing reason.
He reasoned about the limitations of reason.
Apart from mathematics, we know nothing for certain.
Yet to live a human life, we still have to take action
in spite of our uncertainties.
“We deal in hopeful probabilities, not in certainties.”
While Berkeley said that we can never know
whether the world exists independently of ourselves,
Hume took a further step and reasoned
that we can’t even be sure we have “selves.”
As far as our experiencing selves are concerned,
We can only call ourselves “bundles of sensations.”
We should admit that we do not really use our intellects much
in making our life-decisions.
“Reason,” he said, “is the slave of the passions.”
If we cannot be certain of anything,
how ridiculous it is to think we have the answer to everything!
We should be modest, moderate and tolerant,
Because the choices we make
always assume that there are connections
which we are unable to prove.
So we are all groping in the dark.
David Hume was a total skeptic,
Yet had a moderate and compassionate attitude.
Since all we know that we observe is our perceptions, we cannot know that anything exists.
Since all we see is one event following another, we cannot say we know that one event causes another.
Since we cannot observe our own self, we cannot be sure that we even have one;
the most a person can say about himself or herself is that they are a “bundle of sensations.”
Hume was “ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look at no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.”
He was a great skeptic, and like Socrates, showed that we know much less than we think we know.
However, he said that a good skeptic should doubt his or her own doubts!
Takeaways for Hume:
1. “Hume-mility!”
Human beings are limited vessels.
Our minds can give us the illusion that we can master the universe.
Don’t buy it!
2. “Hume – manity!”
We are all the slaves of our passions,
And we all follow custom much more than our intellects,
So no one has the right to think oneself superior.
We’re all in the same boat, groping in the dark.
Immanuel Kant
Considered the most in-depth philosopher since Plato and Aristotle
Was brilliant and sought-after as a speaker
The first philosophy professor
Never left his home town, never married
Internationally known during his lifetime
Most famous of his books: The Critique of Pure Reason
It’s a difficult book, so he wrote an introduction to it called the Prolegomena
Followed John Locke: what is the main limitation on what humans can know?
It’s not what there is to know – it’s our own abilities
Our knowledge is conditioned by the limited capacities of our senses and of our minds
Just because we cannot perceive something directly doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist
A tasteless, odorless invisible gas can kill you!
Gravity exists – yet we can never see it in itself
What we can perceive with our senses is bound to be much less than what actually exists.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” - Hamlet to Horatio
We mistake the ‘photographs’ in our minds for actual reality.
We cannot know the actual nature or essence of a thing.
All we can really know of it is made up of the impressions in our minds.
This is similar to Locke, Berkeley, Hume.
There are two worlds available to us:
The world of phenomena – the things we can and do experience directly, with our senses.
The world of noumena - the things we cannot experience directly, even though we know they are real.
Our knowledge of a dog or a mouse is that of our sense impressions. But what that dog or mouse may be in itself is forever unknown to us, and unknowable.The unknown world he called the noumenal world, also called the transcendental world.
Space and time are forms of our sensibility. We cannot imagine anything existing outside of space and time.
Yet we know that some things do.
We experience Beauty, Justice, Peace – are they in space or time?
We can work math problems. Where does math exist? In space or time?
Where does the mind exist? Inside the skull? Then how can it perceive so much beyond its physical confines?
Kant endeavored to show through pure reason, without any faith or religion, that there exists a non-physical realm of existence, and that we interact with that realm constantly.
The physical world we interact with has been shown to follow laws of math and science in every way.
Yet we experience freedom of choice, and that has no connection with the laws of science.
It cannot be diagrammed or proved, yet we know we have it.
Kant has had a huge impact on the study of reality known as metaphysics. His work encourages scientists to explore the unknown and to realize there are limits on what they can learn.
His biggest impact, however, has been in the area of Ethics and Morality.
How can we know right and wrong if we do not have confidence in religion to tell us? He worked out this problem in a way that has become basic to moral thinking.
If all is material, where in the material world do we make choices that affect our bodies’ movements?
If all is material, where in the material world do we decide whether something is good or bad?
Choices and moral decisions must be made in some realm –
a realm we can’t touch, feel see, smell, taste.
Yet it is REAL.
This is what Kant called the Noumenal Realm.
Hegel
An inventor of historical theories - the first to say that history is an important part of philosophy.
Marx built his communist system on the framework of Hegel,
though Marx completely rejected Hegel's idea that all proceeds from spirit - mind - ideas;
Marx was a total materialist, or tried to be.
In Hegel, the Absolute is thought thinking of itself.
Everything that exists is the product of the knowing mind.
The absolute mind is a series of interlocking triads: a dialectic among thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
All that is is a grand unfolding of necessary reason.
This made Kierkegaard sick!
Arthur Schopenhauer
All our experience is structured by the will.
The will is as powerful a force as that which creates galaxies. yert it’s purposeless.
We are driven by will and passions, not reason.
We can live failrly well if we escape the passionate tyranny of the will and be placid.
Loved Buddha! Was the first Western philosopher to learn about Eastern wisdom.
Said that our constant throng of desires is what keeps us from happiness and peace –
exactly what Buddha taught.
He saw Kant as changing human knowledge forever!
through five major breakthroughs (pp. 138-139):
- Reality is divided into what we can experience and what we can’t: the phenomenal & the noumenal
- All experience depends on our bodily apparatus
- We can’t imagine anything that we can’t experience
- Time/space and cause/effect are categories of our minds only and not of the world outside our minds
- Science is key to understanding the empirical world, but can’t help us understand anything outside that world, i.e. in the noumenal world
His criticism of Kant:To exist as a separate something, a thing must exist in time and space, otherwise it flows into everything else.
Time and space are the only things that differentiate objects.
Outside the categories of time and space, everything must be One.
Cause and effect exist only within the phenomenal world. Therefore nothing in the noumenal world can be the cause of anything else.
The phenomenal is not different from the noumenal. It is the same thing, just understood in a different way.
The world, according to Schopenhauer, is a mess of conflicting wills, both human and cosmic, and it is not really fit to be our home.
What did Schopenhauer say we should turn to, if we should look away from the world?
Art, music, drama, poetry: these give us a glimpse of what is more real and important than the ordinary world.
Writers influenced by him read like a who’s who of modern literature:
Tolstoy
Turgenev
Proust
Zola
De Maupassant
Hardy
Conrad
Thomas Mann
Chekhov
Maugham
G. B. Shaw
Pirandello
Rilke
Samuel Beckett
T. S. Eliot
Quotes from bumper stickers illustrating Schopenhauer:
“Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.”
“Space is what keeps everything from bashing into everything else.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson & the Transcendentalists
Emerson excelled as a preacher and pastor in a progressive Protestant church, but left to become an independent lecturer and scholar
Gave a speech entitled //The American Scholar// in 1837, which was called “America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence."
Chief ideas: Individuality, Freedom
The ability for humankind to realize and achieve almost anything
The relationship between the Soul, which is a part of Nature, and the surrounding world.
Compare Rousseau, who said that children are corrupted by the unnatural world of civilization.
He influenced:
Thoreau (author of Walden; a pioneer in civil disobedience)
Walt Whitman (Emerson endorsed his poetry and began his fame)
At any given time in the world, someone is reading one of Emerson’s Essays.
Takeaways for Emerson:
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
“We must be our own before we can be another's.”
Suggestion: Find and read his essay “Self-Reliance.”
Nietszche
Nietzsche took the view that there were two moralities: master morality (the morality of the noble individual)
and slave morality (the morality of the masses, epitomized by Christian ethics).
Master morality invigorated the human race, whereas slave morality was a denial of life.
Nietzsche saw his worldly outlook as a celebration of the will to power, which finds its highest expression in the noble individual,
the Übermensch or Superman, who has risen beyond the slave categories of “good” and “evil”
and who lives by the principle “There is no god or human over me.”
No moral obligations bind the Superman.
He may lie and victimize others freely to get what he desires.
In the U.S. in the 1930s, the two Jewish high school students who created Superman Comics,
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, presented Superman as a Nazi-fighter.
Thus the arrogant, elitist, racist “Superman” of Nietzsche was defeated by an American Superman!
Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
The ultimate internal human battle is between two forces,
the Apollonian (the force of measure, order, harmony)
and the Dionysian (the force of excess, destruction, creative power).
He did not see Apollonian order and harmony as creative.
He died insane, of syphilis!
Kierkegaard said the most important human activity is decision making,
and the most important relationship is that of the individual to God.
He's often called the very first Existentialist
because of his insistence on actual experience rather than abstract theory.
Hegel's insistence on abstract theory was what Kierkegaard chiefly objected to in Hegel,
especially Hegel's ideas about the dialectic of existence.
Kierkegaard's idea of dread and anxiety
as being a major facet of being human
is a common note in most existentialists.
Prologue to Moral Philosophy
Voltaire: A person who risked and sacrificed to bring moral betterment to society -
and succeeded!
Voltaire (1694-1778) was one of the best loved and most respected writers of his time.
When young, he realized it was urgent for people to learn certain profound new ideas, especially those of Newton and Locke.
He “bombarded the world nonstop with advanced views on every subject under the sun” --Bryan Magee
This made Voltaire a major figure in the historical era known as “the Enlightenment.”
Voltaire quickly became France’s most popular playwright.
He wrote novels, pamphlets, essays, histories and more – all brilliant and funny.
Imagine if such a person were today’s most popular filmmaker or music star!
Frequently in trouble with the rulers: in and out of jail, mostly on trumped-up charges
Two years of exile in England showed him what a society was like that respected laws and the individual
“The Enlightenment” meant that our ideas must be backed up by reasonable evidence, not just authority or superstition.
“Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them”
Most of Europe (unlike England) was ruled by tyrants supported by intolerant Catholics that persecuted their enemies
Voltaire’s Liberalism supported social equality and the rule of law, opposing tyranny and hierarchy
Fled Paris’ persecution for the village of Ferny. Applied his intelligence to build up the village’s industry and made it rich. A statue of Voltaire still stands in the town square.
Became friends with famous rulers like Russia’s Catherine the Great and Prussia’s Frederick the Great, yet was often in trouble with them for his anti-monarchist view
A “serial monogamist,” Voltaire lived with a series of brilliant woman and learned from their ideas.
These included scientist and philosopher Emelie du Chatelet; see page 108, and seehttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emilie-du-chatelet/
Voltaire is not spotlighted in our textbook; to include him in your term paper, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry at
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/
Quotes from Voltaire:
· "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
· “In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give it to the other.”
· "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
· "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
· “It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."
· "True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others."
· “All the reasoning of men is not worth one sentiment of woman.”
Takeaways from Voltaire:
Stick with the truth! Persecution and imprisonment are passing.
Wit and humor are signs of a gentle soul;
they can enable you to tell the truth and be accepted even when the truth is hard to take.
So be compassionate!
Existentialism
Some of the main themes in existentialism are:(1) Traditional and academic philosophy is sterile and remote from real life.
(2) Philosophy must focus on the individual in his or her confrontation with the world.
(3) The world is irrational, beyond total comprehension or accurate philosophical conceptualization.
(4) The world is absurd: there is no explanation why it is the way it is.
(5) Senselessness, triviality, separation, and so on, pervade human existence, causing anxiety, dread, self-doubt, and despair.
(6) One faces the necessity of choosing how to live within this absurd and irrational world. This is the existential predicament.
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are important forerunners of existentialism.
They held that philosophical systems that seek to make everything seem rational fail because not everything is.
Such systems are futile attempts to overcome pessimism and despair.
Kierkegaard opposed the Hegelian view of the world’s utter rationality.
Philosophy must speak to anguished existence in an irrational world,
and Kierkegaard viewed with disdain philosophy’s concern with ideal truths and abstract metaphysics.
The earth is a place of suffering, fear, and dread.
The central philosophical problem is sickness-unto-death; only subjective commitment to God can grant relief.
Attempts to find the answer to despair spread into arts, literature, and culture generally
(as found, for instance, in art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism,
and in the literature of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett), and persist in philosophy.
Albert Camus
We mask despair in an absurd world with false optimism and self-deception.
We are strangers to ourselves. The world defeats our most fundamental needs.
When we see this, the basic question is, Is there any reason not to commit suicide?
Yet suicide is an unacceptable acquiescence.
Only by struggling against the absurdity of life is it possible to give life meaning and value.
The individual must spend life fighting the “plague” of injustice and violence through measured and nonfanatical revolt.
In The Stranger, Camus’ first novel, published in 1942,
Meursault is a stranger even to himself, though the events of the story point to the possibility of authentic existence.
The Plague, first published in 1947, tells the allegorical story of the fight of an Algerian town
against a deadly epidemic; in that very fight life has dignity and meaning in the face of absurd death.
Short Videos on Albert Camus
1. Quotes from his writing:
http://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A2KIo9gCIXpULVsAxSL7w8QF;_ylu=X3oDMTBzYmZpbnA0BHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMjU-?p=youtube+albert+camus&vid=ceaff6886bab20da756e2aece728e96d&l=1%3A58&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DVN.608036012209540296%26pid%3D15.1&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DvFymaUU5j4o&tit=%3Cb%3EAlbert+Camus+%3C%2Fb%3EQuotes&c=24&sigr=11a4kpf8a&sigt=10qalhg81&age=0&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av%2Cm%3Asa&&tt=b
2. Short drama on robotic society:
http://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A2KIo9gCIXpULVsAxCL7w8QF;_ylu=X3oDMTBzZjc2N3EzBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMjQ-?p=youtube+albert+camus&vid=a014e0cbe942eaf7e73dab2ffb163081&l=4%3A33&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DVN.608048579289154997%26pid%3D15.1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dw3KfUp7LtkU&tit=%3Cb%3EAlbert+Camus+%3C%2Fb%3EDiscovery+of+the+Absurd&c=23&sigr=11b6qmm5g&sigt=11bvid62k&age=0&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av%2Cm%3Asa&&tt=b
Jean-Paul Sartre
Camus was agnostic. Sartre was atheistic. Sartre: Man is abandoned; that is, God does not exist.
Implications of abandonment:
(1) There is no common human nature or essence; existence precedes essence; you are what you make of yourself.
(2) There is no ultimate reason why things are the way they are and not some other way.
(3) Because there is no divine plan there is no determinism: human beings are free.
(4) There is no objective standard of values. Hence, we are responsible for what we are and must choose our own values.
And in doing so we choose for all. We experience our responsibility in anguish or hide from it in bad faith.
Only through acceptance of our responsibility and in choosing a fundamental life project may we live in authenticity.
You Are What You Do. Persons create themselves through their choices.
The choices that count are those that issue forth in actions.
There is no hidden or “true self” behind those deeds.
Nausea, Sartre’s first novel, published in 1938, shows Roquentin’s visceral reaction
to what he sees the meaninglessness of life;
Being and Nothingness is an exposition of Sartre’s own philosophy.
Martin Heidegger
For Heidegger the truth of things lies not in phenomena but in Being itself.
Being itself has been reduced to a world of objects (i.e., it has been forgotten).
We are basically ignorant about the thing that matters most: the true nature of Being.
Awareness of the priority of Being would require a new beginning for philosophy and for Western civilization.
In his first major work, Being and Time (1927), still sought true knowledge in a priori structures found in the human mind.
But later, after his “turning about,” he sought a direct approach to Being itself.
It is with respect to his earlier work that Heidegger is called an existentialist.
But despite the superficial resemblance, Heidegger and Sartre are philosophically quite different.
For Heidegger, Being is the basic principle of philosophy and is absolutely necessary;
for Sartre, individual existence was of paramount importance
and because of the nonexistence of God, nothing about Being is necessary.
There Heidegger was concerned with Sinn (sense or meaning),
the absence of which was the problem of human existence.
The cultural and intellectual poverty of the twentieth century
is the result of the assumption that man is the measure of all things;
an idea, entrenched in Western civilization since the pre-Socratic Sophist Protagoras,
that found its fullest expression in Nietzsche.
Heidegger was a Nazi since his youth and spoke out in favor of Hitler.
After Hitler's defeat, Heidegger was silent on the subject.
Does advanced intellectualism in itself guarantee personal moral character and ethical insight?
Nope.
Moral Philosophy: This is a survey of the assigned reading in the text, with some issues omitted and others added. Here we return to many of the philosophers whom we have looked at, this time for their views on ethics.
Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the study of moral judgments, which are value judgments about what is virtuous and base, just and unjust, morally right and wrong, morally good and bad or evil, morally proper and improper, and so on.
Because many questions can be asked about moral judgments, ethics encompasses many issues. The most important question of ethics, however, is simply, Which moral judgments are correct?
The modern growth of sociopathy
For those writing their term projects on ethics: consider these issues.For a corporate CEO who makes a profitable product that’s harmful – or a politician who makes war for profit –
What are their possible thought processes, if they are not sociopaths?
Please note that it’s established that normal brain function includes moral and ethical sensitivity.
A person who does not have this (serial killers, some politicians, etc) is not a normal human.
Sociopaths who undergo brain scans are shown not to have this moral center in the brain.
Unfortunately many large and powerful institutions are influenced by sociopaths and their enablers.
That’s why studies are published that go against the idea that human beings are naturally moral.
“Moral knowledge is not possible” - an idea popular among subjectivists
Ethical skepticism: The doctrine that moral knowledge is not possible.
Individual Relativism: What is right or wrong morally is what each individual believes is right or wrong. This is a subjectivist ethical philosophy.
Descriptive Relativism: Not a doctrine of ethics, it merely says that people in different cultures have different beliefs about what is morally right and wrong; it says nothing about what is morally right and wrong.
Cultural relativism
The idea that what a culture believes is morally right or wrong is morally right or wrong for people in that culture.
This is a relativistic ethical outlook, sometimes mistakenly called a “philosophy.”
Two Kinds of Hedonism
Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure.
Two varieties of ethical hedonism:
Egoistic ethical hedonism (one ought to seek his or her own pleasure over other things).
Universalistic ethical hedonism (otherwise known as Utilitarianism, in which one ought to seek the greatest pleasure – the greatest good – for the greatest number of people).
Divine-command ethics: God ordains what one ought to do (examples: Augustine and Aquinas).
Consequentialism: One ought to do whatever has the most desirable consequences (Epicureans, stoics, utilitarians).
Deontological ethics: One must do one’s moral duty (in most cases, regardless of consequences) (Kant). Ethics are defined by one’s intentions.
Virtue ethics: One ought to do what a virtuous person would do (Plato, Aristotle).
Relativism: One ought to do what her or his culture or society thinks one ought to do. (No real philosopher is a relativist, but many students are!)
Why are no philosophers relativists, while many people in general accept relativism?
Relativism is always a fallacy. Why do people so easily accept relativistic fallacies, especially in the moral area?
The Early Greeks on Ethics:
Both the Sophists and Socrates taught that moral judgments must be supported by reason.
Socrates was also concerned with the meaning of words that signify moral virtues, such as justice, piety, and courage.
Socrates: Wrong behavior is due to ignorance. Intelligent people always do the right thing because they understand the consequences.
[Not in text: The only harm you can really do is harm to your own soul. When you hurt someone, that’s what you’re doing.]
Plato on Ethics
Theory of Forms: At the apex of all Forms is the Form of the Good.
Corollary: Because the Forms define true reality, individual things are real only insofar as they partake of the Form of the Good.
Additional corollary: Evil is unreal.
Because Forms are apprehended by reason, one should strive for knowledge of the Good and hence be ruled by reason.
One ruled by reason exhibits four cardinal virtues—temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice—and has a well-ordered soul; virtue is its own reward.
Aristotle on Ethics
Aristotle held that our highest good—our natural objective—is happiness.
[Not in text: He stated that happiness lies in finding out what does well, and then doing it for the benefit of all.]
Though both Plato and Aristotle were proponents of virtue ethics, for Plato, the Good is an immaterial Form; for Aristotle, the good is what human beings actually seek (happiness).
For Plato, the moral good transcends nature; for Aristotle the moral good finds its grounding in human nature.
Epicureanism on Ethics
Personal pleasure is the highest good.
We ought to seek the pleasant life, which comes with satisfaction of desires that are natural and the satisfaction of which is necessary for a pleasant life.
Natural desires that need not be satisfied may be satisfied if doing so does not lead to discomfort or pain.
Unnatural/unnecessary desires ought never to be satisfied.
[Not in text: Again, the problem is defining pleasure; what’s pleasurable to one person may be painful or disgusting to another. Philosophies based on pleasure have become so hard to define that they may be considered outdated, or not having kept up with mankind’s psychological evolution.]
The Stoics on Ethics
We ought to seek the untroubled life, which comes through acceptance of the natural order of things.
All that occurs is in accordance with natural law (reason):
Whatever happens is the inevitable outcome of the logic of the universe;
all that happens has a reason;
so whatever happens is for the best.
We ought to remain uninvolved emotionally in our fate, and our lives will be untroubled.
Epictetus was among the most famous Stoic teachers.
The most famous Stoic writer was Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
St. Thomas Aquinas on Ethics
He adapted Aristotelian thought for Christianity.
Goodness for humans is happiness. Natural law is the law of reason, which leads us to our natural goal if we follow it.
God’s divine law, revealed to us through God’s grace, guides us to happiness everlasting.
There are two sets of virtues: the natural virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, and the higher virtues of faith, love, and hope.
Hume
Can there be ethics after Hume?
See the text for how he showed logically that ethics cannot be based on logic or revelation. That left the philosophers of his time with four options:
(1) Despite Hume, ethics might seek to establish that morality can be grounded on reason or on God— Kant’s option was reason.
(2) Ethical thinkers might try to find objective sources of moral standards other than reason or God, such as on ideas of social contract or general agreement—the Utilitarians’ option.
(3) They might seek to determine how one should act given the absence of objective moral standards—the existentialists’ option.
(4) They might abandon the search for moral standards altogether and concentrate on ethical descriptivism, i.e. just describing and not evaluating what people think is right and wrong—the option of analytic philosophy. This is no longer a humanistic philosophy because it dismisses the question of what is right or wrong.
Hume. Hmmmmmmm.
Aaaand now --
KANT, ETHICS AND RIGHTS!
Kant’s Duty Ethics
In Kant's view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth
is not the outcome achieved by the action,
but the motive behind the action.
The only motive that can endow an act with moral value
is one that arises from universal principles discovered by reason.
Duty is the supreme origin of moral action.
One needs Reason to be able to make moral decisions.
A poisonous snake can’t be blamed for killing; it has no reason.
A good reason for a moral decision isn’t subjective; it has to be universal –
otherwise why would we try to persuade each other of it?
The Categorical Imperative is Kant's famous statement of this duty:
Act only according to principles that you believe should become universal laws.
So if you’re thinking about cheating, for example –
can you believe that cheating should be universally allowed?
In other words- nothing you do can be moral
unless you can show it applies to everyone at all times & places.
Can you commit suicide out of love?
No way. A defense of suicide cannot be universalized.
IN ADDITION – Reason shows is that it is everyone’s duty
to protect the rights and dignity of all --
--and that no one should ever be used as a means to an end.
– an Enlightenment idea.
To Kant,
morality is founded on reason just as science is founded on reason.
The Categorical Imperative:
“Act only according to maxims which you can will also to be universal laws.”
Kant’s ethics are based on DUTY.
Kant’s idea of DUTY reinforces the idea that people have RIGHTS –
another Enlightenment idea.
HUMAN RIGHTS
In the ancient world, there were some glimmerings of the idea
that there were some things rulers should not be allowed to do to people.
Cyrus of Persia established some rights principles
but they did not live beyond his culture’s history.
Hebrew Prophets frequently took Hebrew kings to task for treating people wrongly.
Rome gave its citizens some protections.
But after the fall of Rome,
Europe was dominated by the idea that the ruler got his authority from God
and therefore could basically do no wrong.
This idea held until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
John Locke’s teaching was that each individual
was intellectually endowed with reason,
and therefore people are equal.
This gives the ruler no divine right to have his way with people
People have rights. This idea took over the world gradually.
They are “endowed by their creator” with rights.
But this doesn’t mean God gave them rights: rights come from Nature.
Kant:
Reason shows is that it is everyone’s duty
to protect the rights and dignity of all --
--and that no one should ever be used as a means to an end.
Morality is founded on reason just as science is founded on reason.
World War II showed the consequences
of trying to pretend that people don’t have rights.
After the war came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Although power-possessors keep trying to take people’s rights away,
the principles of human rights are universally acknowledged today.
Chapter 11: Moral and Political Philosophy
Hobbes on Ethics
He espoused a philosophy of relentless materialism.
There is no natural moral law. “Good” and “evil” denote only what one desires or detests. Morality is thus a quirk of the individual. But it is natural for one to preserve himself/herself at all costs.
A wise person recognizes that a state ruler has absolute power. Thus the wise person surrenders his or her rights to that authority, which he called the "Leviathan."
One should respect one's contracts to others and to the society as a whole; the rational basis of society is this social contract, agreed to by all sensible citizens
Hobbes said that all rulers rule by "force and fraud." That's just the way it is.
Hobbes’ views, like Nietzsche’s, have been used to support
Nihilism
Misanthropy
Sociopathy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau was Swiss, which made him love democracy
His influence was most felt in France
The idea of “the noble savage” originates with Rousseau
So does the slogan of the French Revolution: “Liberty, equality, fraternity”
“Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”
He often lived hand to mouth and had great difficulties early in life, yet wrote for Diderot’s Encyclopedia and composed a successful opera
Wrote highly popular books on what kind of changes were needed for society, including novels
A radical thinker: 3 major ideas
--Civilization is not a good thing; nature is better
--Feeling should replace reason as our guide to life
--Humanity has a “general will” which every individual must obey
Society corrupts people and forces them to repress their feelings
Children are taught to have fake smiles and to pretend to think and feel things that they don’t
We must change education from memorization to developing a child’s potential
A loving family is a better environment for this kind of education than a school
God exists, and is beyond all reasoning – we cannot prove God’s existence, and so what?
Religion should be based on feeling, not thinking
Emotions of awe and reverence flow naturally out of the heart when one contemplates God
Those emotions should be the basis of one’s relationship with God
The “general will” on a subject: establish it by popular vote. Then give officials absolute power to make it happen.
Government’s purpose is to impose the general will. The idea was used by Communism and Fascism.
Rousseau’s is the opposite of Locke’s approach: Locke said that government’s purpose is to protect individual rights.
However, Rousseau did declare that citizens always have the right of revolution and can overturn and replace its rulers.
Takeaways from Rousseau:
“Civilization” is not necessarily your friend
Emotions are a good thing
Life is actually more emotional than rational, and that’s good! (Compare Hume, who said basically the same thing.)
David Hume's Game-Changer on Ethics
Hume was as skeptical as Hobbes about morals, but not misanthropic.
He stated that moral principles are neither divine edicts nor discoverable by reason.
Value judgments, he concluded, are based on emotion, not reason.
Goodness consists in traits and actions that promote the welfare of people (this idea was taken up in the nineteenth century by Mills, Bentham and the other Utilitarians). All humans have positive emotional responses to goodness.
When someone is morally praised or condemned, it is the person’s moral character that we're considering. In the respect that he sees moral character as a foundation of life, Hume is part of the virtue ethics tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.
Locke
We are all God's property. God created us with natural rights, and we are obliged to respect those rights.
We entrust our rights to the state, and the just state rules only with the prior consent of the governed.
The state is the servant of the people. The basis of government is law, not force or fraud.
Government should be separated into three independent branches to preserve justice.
U.S. constitutional theory: philosophy in practice
No nation has every attempted to set up its governmental structures in such close adherence to philosophical principles.
The US was founded in the spirit of supporting and protecting equal rights and guaranteed liberties.
The Declaration of Independence declares belief in "the Laws of Nature and nature's God."
The people have the right to alter or abolish any form of government that fails to protect people's rights.
Morality in Kant
Kant saw religion declining fast and wanted to protect mankind’s moral sense. So he made it his project to show that morality could be based on pure reason and did not require revelation.
Kant held that reason alone can ascertain principles of morality; they cannot be revealed through scientific investigation since scientific inquiry can never reveal to us principles which we know hold without exception (as moral principles do).
He observed that there are many things we know intuitively or innately that we could never reason our way to. The basics of morality are included. Where do such things exist? In the noumenal realm, outside the phenomenal realm: beyond the senses and ultimately even beyond the grasp of the intellect.
The supreme principle of morality for Kant: A moral rule is universal and absolute. Thus, the supreme prescription of morality is to act in such a way that you could, rationally, see the principle on which you act to be a universal law.
A moral rule may be expressed as a “categorical imperative.”
Why you should do what you should do:
You should do what you should do because it is right.
The consequences of an act do not determine whether the act is good; only the intent or “will” with which it is done does that.
Rationality is the source of all value, so the rational will is alone inherently good.
Because a moral imperative must hold without exception, it differs from a “hypothetical imperative” which states that one ought to do something if such-and-such an end is desired.
Another formulation of the categorical imperative: Treat rational beings (e.g., humans) in every instance as ends and never just as means. This supports Human Rights.
Duty-based ethical systems such as Kant’s are known as “deontological” ethical systems (Greek deont- that which is binding). The duty-based approach also supports Human Rights – we have a duty to treat others well.
Utilitarians
A different view was taken by the Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
In Utilitarianism, the rightness of an action is identical with the happiness it produces as a consequence, with everyone considered.
Bentham: Happiness is pleasure, and positive ethical value-words have meaning only when defined in terms of pleasure.
Mill: Some pleasures are better than others; quality, as well as quantity, of pleasure is a factor in moral value.
Morality in Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche
From the relatively benign influence of Hegel –
To the extremely mixed influence of Marx and Nietzsche –
Philosophy formed major social movements of the 20th century.
Hegel taught the three-part movement of history.
Marx made this into the inevitability of worker rule.
Nietzsche preached that the strong individual has the right to take whatever he pleases.
This led to Nazism and other forms of fascism,
as well as to semi-sociopathic worldviews such as Ayn Rand's.
Hegel
History must be brought to bear in any attempt to create a philosophy.
Mind and spirit are what everything is made of, including Nature.
Evolution of self-awareness: when humanity’s mind and spirit become completely aware of themselves, peace will arrive.
This means the more we understand ourselves, the more we can reach a conflict-free state. This means our human essence is not about conflict, but about harmony.
“Spirit” or “mind” is the origin of everything, including Nature.
This substance, and this process, is called “Geist.” The word means something halfway between Mind and Spirit.
“Zeitgeist” means “spirit of the age.”
Change is always intelligible, never chaotic or random.
All change proceeds in three stages:
Thesis
Antithesis
Synthesis
Thesis: something comes to be.
Antithesis: the reaction to whatever it was that came to be. The Antithesis “battles” or contradicts the Thesis.
Synthesis: the two combine with each other—forming a new Thesis.
Then comes a new Antithesis, etc. The process can only stop when a conflict-free state of being is achieved.
In Hegel’s vision, the individual is ALIENATED from society because of the constant conflict all around—even though he has created this society himself!
The conflict exists because the Geist has not reconciled itself to its own unity. When this happens, the individual can finally know himself/herself, and be free.
Individuals are always motivated to keep changing things until the Geist reaches its conflict-free destiny. This is the purpose of Alienation.
Hegel: Left & Right
In Hegel’s vision, the Prussian state of his own time was ideal.
Among his students were Right Hegelians who believed in traditional power and authority coming from aristocracies and the strong. This philosophy combined with Nietzsche’s to promote Nazism.
Left Hegelians gathered under Marx to promote the revolutionary socialist state run by the workers. This led to communism.
Hegel himself could not have favored either of these future developments.
Hegel’s idea was that every human being fundamentally desires to overcome others.
(Hegel obviously did not understand the traditional feminine viewpoint that people are more about cooperation than competition.)
Hegel felt that slaves are only conquered because they are not willing to fight to the death.
So Hegel believed that you cannot be conquered unless you already decide you can be.
Tell this to the victims of snipers and ambushes and roadside IED bombs.
Hegel felt that slaves gradually come to an intuition that they can overcome,
because they see that the result of their hard work is to accomplish things of value.
So they can work had on destroying their masters and accomplish it!
This is an idea from Hegel that Marx applied to his ideology of revolutionary communism.
I don’t call it a philosophy because Marx himself didn’t. It exists not to seek wisdom but control and domination.
“Bildung” in Hegel is self-building education. It’s the source of all progress.
A slave who accepts the approved Christian ideology is not practicing Bildung.
He ceases to fight and struggle and accepts his master.
Hegel believes that Bildung makes the Great Man. He though that the Great Man embodies the State. Like Napoleon.
Isn’t this like Nietzsche?
Hegel Takeaways
1. Reality is a HISTORICAL process, not a static one. Change is of its essence.
2.Change can be understood; it is not chaotic.
3. Alienation: humans feel estranged from things around them that they have accepted or even created themselves.
Karl Marx
Marx was violently anti-religious (religion was “the opium of the people”) and spent his entire life writing and doing things to provoke the overthrow of governments and the end of religion.
He combined Hegel’s dialectic with English economic theory and French political ideas; he didn’t study that much philosophy beyond Hegel.
While Hegel said that ultimate reality was spiritual, Marx claimed that everything was matter and caused by material things.
Thus Marxism is called “dialectical materialism.”
The basic fact of everyone’s life is what he/she does for a living. Thus economics us the ultimate social reality.
In Marx, the individual is ALIENATED from his place in the economy as an oppressed worker. For Marx, the process can only END with the ideal state.
This conflict-free state arrives when the working classes have taken over completely from any form of aristocracy.
Until then, constant “class struggle” is necessary.
However - Marxist states have always been dominated by powerful dictators, never by “workers’ councils.”
Power possessors are those who know how to take and keep power -- this time in the name of the people.
Resistance to dictatorships spelled the end of Marxism in the former Soviet Union.
Because Marxist governments regimes run their economies and markets by command from the top, their economies have tended to stop being creative.
China and Vietnam have modified their Marxism to allow for some marketplace freedom, and their economies have grown.
North Korea has a dictated economy or “command economy,” and poverty is overwhelming the country. Cuba is in a similar situation.
According to Marx. the process of workers taking over countries is absolutely objectively true and necessary. Anyone who disagrees with it is denying reality and is just wrong.
This is why Marxists have had few qualms about executing anyone who has disagreed with them.
Compare Augustine of Hippo’s idea of the “saved” as deserving to live and everyone else being expendable.
Marx: “Human history consists of successive stages of development of various means of production.”
Human needs gradually develop for means of production that go against existing “productive relations” or established institutions or practices.
For example, humanity now needs new sources of energy. But the fossil fuel industry is the established means. Therefore that industry suppresses new means of energy production.
The fundamental conflict of capitalist society: production is socialized, but ownership is not.
Everyone is forced by the need for money to participate in production.
But ownership is not allowed to be taken up by everyone.
Workers generally do not own the factories where they work.
Everyone is dominated by the need for money.
What is the only necessity for life that is not bought and sold? The air we breathe.
Debt is socialized, but profits are privately held.
Profits are made possible by roads, education, laws, police, etc., which are paid for by everyone.
But profits that are made because of these support structures are held privately.
The longer capitalism lasts, the more wealth is accrued by a smaller and smaller number of people.
This is the income inequality we are now seeing and which many are saying is tearing away at the fabric of the US and the capitalist world.
Workers never own what they produce. This makes them become devalued in their own eyes.
The sole function of political power is the exploitation of one economic class by another.
(Voltaire said that the art of politics lies in the transfer of money from one class to another.)
Marx - Takeaways
What you do for a living is one of the most important things about you.
The government that you vote for, or approve, should keep the strong from abusing the poor and weak.
Hegel and Marx: Overview
Hegel’s idea that a society free of conflict can eventually evolve through nonviolent change is a deeply spiritual concept.
Hegel’s vision is called “Absolute Idealism.” It is profoundly optimistic.
Marx’s vision is also idealistic, but it has extreme violence and vengeance as necessary components.
Chapter 13, Philosophy and Belief in God:
Main Points from Assigned Readings
Chapter introduction:
Religious commitment involves philosophical beliefs.
The philosophy of religion attempts to understand and rationally evaluate these beliefs.
In contrast to theology, it does not make religious assumptions in doing so.
The beliefs of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition have received the most discussion by Western philosophers.
Anselm:
Though he thought it impossible to reason about God or God’s existence without already believing in God, Anselm was willing to evaluate on its own merit and independently of religious assumptions the idea that God does not exist.Anselm’s ontological argument attempts to show that disbelief in God entails self-contradiction.
“If you can think of a being greater than the greatest being you can think of, that shows that you actually believe in the greatest being you can think of!”If you accept this wordplay, you accept the ontological argument.
Thomas Aquinas: “Evil” Does Not Exist
In school he was known a the “Dumb Ox”Became known as a brilliant professor
Eventually he resided in a monastery and never left his room
Wrote highly rational systematic theology
Reconciled Aristotle with the Bible
Stopped writing after having mystic visions
Called all his writing “nothing but straw”
Declared official theologian of Roman Catholic Church
In Aquinas, the battle between good & evil is a fiction,
a story we tell ourselves because we love drama
– but there are no such opposing forces.
He reasoned that existence is inherently good,
and that what we call “evil”
is only a matter of the good being missing or ignored.
Like Socrates & Plato, he said that what is, is good. “Evil” is just the lack of a “due good.”
In other words, evil is unreal.
It‘s only a “hole” in the good.
Evil is not an independent force
and has no energy of its own.It’s just a sign that something is missing.
Thomas Aquinas’ Conclusion
He’s called the foremost theologian of the Church –yet after having mystic visions near the end of his life, Aquinas said,
"I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw."
Takeaways from Aquinas
(1) Reason can strengthen faith.(2) Ultimately, reason is of less value than spiritual experience.
(3) There is no evil per se. It’s just that sometimes the good that should be there is missing.
No one is evil; some people are just missing something.
Mysticism and Juliana of Norwich
“God came to me,” says the mystic, but is such experience a reliable form of knowledge?
Only if it improves your life and your understanding.
Juliana denied that there is any meaningful difference in the validity of mystical revelations made directly to our soul and knowledge derived through reason.
We can know God only partly through revelation; further knowledge comes through loving God.
For Juliana, God lives in us and we in God;
we are one with God and are nurtured and fed knowledge of God and of ourselves by this divine parent.
(This is close to what the rationalist and skeptic Bishop George Berkeley believed centuries later.)
We can love God more by loving our own souls.
The knowledge God gives to the mystics can provide reasons
for ordinary people to have hope in the midst of wars, plagues, and religious disputes.
Kierkegaard
For Søren Kierkegaard, God is beyond the grasp of reason,
and the idea that God came to us as a man in the person of Jesus
is intellectually absurd; yet to Kierkegaard, this absurdity
is in itself good reason to believe.
Truth is subjective; it lies not in what we believe, but in how we live.
We must commit ourselves to God
not through a search for objective truth (as if it would give meaning to life)
but through a leap of faith: a non-intellectual, passionate commitment to Christianity.
The objective uncertainty of God is essential to a true faith in Him.
What was Kierkegaard's objection to Aristotle,
who said that what makes people human is their ability to reason?
Kierkegaard said that instead, the essential thing about people is their ability to ___.
Chapter 14: Feminism and Philosophy
Because philosophy is the search for truth and wisdom, it is often one of the first fields in which the oppressed express themselves as soon as they are able.
Feminist philosophy arose as soon as women gained enough rights to be regarded as individuals with the same capabilities as males.
In the first wave of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was one of the first statements of the obvious and egregious ways in which women had been deprived of the natural regard due every human.
In the second wave, women began to define attitudes and abilities that are essentially female. This has been called "essentialism." They began to identify patriarchal patterns as having pervaded and dominated society for milennia. Paternal ownership of property and its dominator model have pervaded politics, economics, culture, religion, education and more, at the expense of women and children, as well as at the expense of gentleness, caring, communication and relationship. Both liberal feminism and radical feminism are part of the second wave.
The third wave of feminism has included a wide variety of sectarian approaches to feminism.
Feminist moral theory is more personal, subjective and relationship-oriented than mainstream society's logic and reason-based moral theory coming from Kant, traditional legal reasoning and criminal justice policy.
Back to Ch 13: Mary Daly
Do you feel that many people who think of God still picture an old bearded white man?
The stereotype images from Michelangelo certainly depict God as such.
Mary Daley believes that this image is very pervasive and damaging to the worldview we share.To revise the false image of God passed on to us by institutions such as organized religions, we need to change:
The God who demands suffering
The God who judges and condemns
The God who creates false consciences and unnecessary guilt.
The only real God is Love.
Ch 14: Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings
Gilligan is known as the founder of "difference feminism.”
She believed that women have different moral tendencies than men:
that men think in terms of rules and justice,
while women think in terms of caring and relationships.
Gilligan’s primary focus came to be on moral development in girls.
She formed a new psychology for women by listening to them and rethinking the meaning of self and selfishness.
She outlines three stages of moral development, starting from selfishness, then progressing to social or conventional morality, and finally to post- conventional or principled morality.
What is the difference between conventional morality and principled morality? It may be conventional to say that an act is right because it’s traditional and common practice, while a principled person may have to reject that act because of their higher standards.
Women must learn to tend to their own interests as well as the interests of others.
She thinks that women hesitate to judge, because they see the complexities of relationships.
Noddings, like Rousseau. is concerned with education in caring and morality.
In her first major book Caring (1984), she explored a feminine approach to ethics and moral education.
Her argument starts from the position that care is basic in human life, and that all people want to be cared for.
In her book Starting at Home: Caring Social Policies, she writes about the environment in which children learn.
When children have parents and teachers who care, they learn how to care themselves.
This allows them to build an ethical ideal: a dependable, caring self.
We learn to care about others through our experience of being cared for.
Instead of starting with an ideal state or republic, care theory starts with an ideal home and moves outward - 'learning first what it means to be cared for, then to care for intimate others, and finally to care about those we cannot care for directly.”
TAKEAWAYS FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF CARING
Because of the social conditioning of men and women to be different from each other
(men oriented to rules and justice, women to love and caring),there is often a difference in the ways men and women interpret the same situation.
Society, as Rousseau insisted, corrupts the individual, who is born with a purity.
Men have dominated society through economics and politics for thousands of years,and therefore society has become dominated by justice rather than caring.
When women take care of themselves, of each other, and of other people,
exercising their natural compassion,in a society that gradually allows women to be more free,
then women are preparing the next major shift in humanity:
closer to the rule of love than to the rule of law.
Principal Causes of Moral Failure according to the Philosophy of Caring
1. Greed for wealth to the detriment of others.
2. Lust for power over the lives of others.
3. Desire for vengeance, whether in the name of:
-honor-justice
-retribution
-closure
-payback
All of the above, though they are part of some cultures and are often considered acceptable, have been specifically opposed by humanity’s major philosophers and spiritual prophets, because of their terrible consequences that can last generations.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." --Gandhi
Post-Colonial Thought
Because of their shared experience of domination, Third World peoples share a general revolutionary consciousness.
Postcolonial thought deals with dislocations caused by conquerors whose imperialism aimed at near-total domination
As with Feminism, when a huge systemic injustice begins to be removed, there is an outburst of original thought.
Philosophy as consciousness-raising about injustice and domination
Third world thought is often Marxist in theory
Models of colonization: Spain, Portugal, Britain, France.
The United States is the most active imperial power remaining in the world
Aspects of colonization:
--Violent subjugation of indigenous peoples
--Introduction of colonizers’ beliefs into traditional societies
--Economic domination and exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor
See the film The Mission about “good guys” within the Spanish Catholic colonial power in South America
Read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins about the covert actions of the World Bank and IMF
Africa
Pan-African philosophy
Oral traditions are being put into writing for the first time and discussed by people outside the originating cultures
This results in insight into tribal philosophy about metaphysics, epistemology, semiotics, ethics, etc.
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Poet, philosopher and post-colonial President of his nation, Senegal
Studied philosophy in France; France was the major colonist of West Africa
Senghor tried to show that socialism was a better match for the African consciousness than capitalism
To the person of “negritude” or blackness, knowledge of an object is achieved through acts of love and identification, emotionally.
The African doesn’t ask “Do you understand me?” Rather, “Do you feel me?”
This quality is superior to the European method of analytical reasoning.
This gentle participation in the act of knowing gives the person of negritude an advantage over the European mode.
The person of negritude is better equipped for a positive human future.
Bob Marley
In Ethiopia, from the time of the Resurrection, Christianity developed separately and independently from the Church in Europe
Ethiopians were taken to Jamaica as slaves and developed their own offshoot of the Ethiopian Orthgodox Church
This developed into Rastafarianism, a culture, religion and philosophy of multiracial peace, harmony and love
Marley expressed this philosophy far and wine through music until he died of a possible poisoning
Desmond Tutu
Anti-apartheid activist; like King, a Christian clergyman
Worked with Mandela and the African National Congress party to democratize South Africa. now one of the world’s most hopeful nations
The concept of humaneness: everyone must have the freedom to become fully human, and apartheid (a hate-based system) made this impossible both for blacks and whites.
Africans corrupted by the west are losing the quality of Ubantu, or being human, because it includes sharing.
“I loathe capitalism because it gives far too great play go our inherent selfishness.”
Nelson Mandela
Undeniably one of the greatest leaders of our time.
Attorney, activist, journalist, went directly from 28 years in prison to become the first fairly elected president of his country.\Visited the US during the Civil Rights movement and learned from Gandhi and King.
Was designated by Ronald Reagan as a terrorist.
Through the Truth and Reconciliation process, white oppressors were allowed to confess and instead of being punished were invited to apply to take their former positions in government.
The Americas
In Central and South America, Toltecs, Incas and Aztecs met a far more powerful and more bloodthirsty adversary in the Christian Spanish
Genocidal aggression reduced Native American tribes in North America to life on reservations, with their way of life taken away
The Iroquois Confederacy: its influence on the U.S. Constitution
In 1987 the U.S. Senate passed a resolution saying that “the confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself.”
The Iroquois place the creation of their constitution at between 1000 and 1400 A.D.
From a historical blog: "The first Righteous Constitution (or: 'Law of the Land') ever to exist in Human History, was created by the Iroquois Confederacy's ratification council in 1142 A.D., August 31, shortly after a total eclipse of the sun, when it was adopted by the Senecas (the last of the five nations to ratify it), at a site that is now a football field in Victor, New York."
http://gettingtruth.blogspot.com/2007/07/iroquois-influenced-united-states.html
In 1754 Benjamin Franklin asked a gathering of American colonial delegates to use the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for the U.S. Articles of Confederation.
In the 1990s an economic resurgence began to create better days for Indian Country
African American Thought
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: social justice
Martin Luther King Jr. was a Boston University Ph.D. in theology and a third-generation Baptist preacher.
Dr. King studied Gandhi and Thoreau and sought to accomplish his goals nonviolently.
He was assassinated one year to the day after he began speaking out for peace and not civil rights alone.
Called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
He was one of the “Three K’s” who opposed the Vietnam War, all assassinated from 1965-68.
Professor Cornel West: Social activism
Cornel West: activist and philosophy professor.
Urges creation of a more compassionate society.
Points out that conventional thinking is the barrier to a better way of life.
Eastern Thought
Hinduism is more a pervasive lifestyle and culture than a religion
The caste system is the means through which
the Hindu power structure exerts control of society
Philosophy:
Reality is absolutely one
Acceptance of Vedic scriptures, especially Upanishads
Upanishads:
Brahman and atman are one
Consciousness is brahman
“That art thou”
The self is brahman
I am brahman
Samsara — the cycle of desire and suffering
Karma — “action”; consequences build up through multiple lifetimes (transmigrations)
Nirvana — permanent liberation from samsara and a merging into brahman
Islamic Philosophy
Flourished in the centuries just after Mohammed
Was part of Islam’s Golden Age
Arab philosophers had huge impact on medieval Christians
Avicenna
Allah (God) is a Necessary Being
Averroës
Eternal creation
Double truth?
Sufism
Mystical strain of Muslim belief
Predates Islam itself
Seeks union with Allah
Al-Ghazali, profound mystic thinker
Kabir, poet and teacher who blended Hinduism and Islam through Sufism
Rumi, one of history’s greatest poets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2D7UwohH48
Intro to Sufism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EQtaQYpzTw
Taoism
Like Hinduism, more a pervasive lifestyle and culture than a religion
Taoism consists of rituals and attitudes emerging long before Lao Tzu
Lao Tzu is in a way the “savior” to emerge from Taoism
Opposed to Confucius’ conservative ideology, which is not a philosophy
Follow the Tao, the natural order of things, which gives rise to yin and yang
Become a sage, cultivating tranquility, modesty, submission, selflessness
Lao Tzu on Virtuous Activity: page 476
Lao Tzu on Government: page 477
Four extremely informative and readable books about Eastern philosophy:
Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings
Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics
Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters
India
Mohandas Gandhi
Satyagraha (“clinging to truth”): the person “must become the change he seeks in the world.”
Helped end discrimination against Indians in South Africa, then turned his attention to the British in India.
It has been called “unbelievable and impossible” that nonviolence would drive the world’s strongest nation out of India.
Did his best to end the caste system, yet it remains.
Rabindranath Tagore
Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Poet, activist and master teacher.
Humans must devote themselves to living the examined life.
“A heart of love, a mind at its service that can cut like a knife, and in some sense the spirit of a child."
Joseph Campbell: Be Your Own Hero
Also see Joseph Campbell tab.
The all-time greatest scholar of mythology
Worked closely with Carl Gustav Jung, whom many call the most important of all psychologists and psychiatrists
Campbell has had a profound impact on the storytelling arts (film, TV, fiction) and thus influenced millions of people – see “The Writer’s Journey” - a book read by nearly every screenwriter
His work is the basis for George Lucas’ “Star Wars”
Humanity has been telling one story over and over: the story of the “Hero with a Thousand Faces”
This hero is called out of his/her Ordinary Reality into an adventure
In the adventure, he/she must face adversaries
The adversaries completely stop his/her quest
A messenger comes to get him started again
When he wins, he brings something new and precious back to the Ordinary Reality
If he loses, he’s an “anti-hero,” yet he still wins wisdom
This story exists in every culture through history
It contains truths that people identify with and live by
It is part of our “collective unconscious” – it is written in our DNA
Campbell presented and analyzed these ideas in many books and interviews
Studying him can help you become “the hero of your own journey.”